Related papers: Synthetic Controls for Experimental Design
We investigate the optimal design of experimental studies that have pre-treatment outcome data available. The average treatment effect is estimated as the difference between the weighted average outcomes of the treated and control units. A…
In a seminal paper Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller [2010] (ADH), see also Abadie and Gardeazabal [2003], Abadie et al. [2014], develop the synthetic control procedure for estimating the effect of a treatment, in the presence of a single…
Since their introduction in Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003), Synthetic Control (SC) methods have quickly become one of the leading methods for estimating causal effects in observational studies in settings with panel data. Formal discussions…
This paper extends the literature on the theoretical properties of synthetic controls to the case of non-linear generative models, showing that the synthetic control estimator is generally biased in such settings. I derive a lower bound for…
The synthetic control method is a an econometric tool to evaluate causal effects when only one unit is treated. While initially aimed at evaluating the effect of large-scale macroeconomic changes with very few available control units, it…
Typically, a randomized experiment is designed to test a hypothesis about the average treatment effect and sometimes hypotheses about treatment effect variation. The results of such a study may then be used to inform policy and practice for…
To estimate the causal effect of an intervention, researchers need to identify a control group that represents what might have happened to the treatment group in the absence of that intervention. This is challenging without a randomized…
This paper studies inference on treatment effects in panel data settings with unobserved confounding. We model outcome variables through a factor model with random factors and loadings. Such factors and loadings may act as unobserved…
Staggered adoption of policies by different units at different times creates promising opportunities for observational causal inference. Estimation remains challenging, however, and common regression methods can give misleading results. A…
The optimal design of experiments typically involves solving an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper, we aim to develop a globally convergent and practically efficient optimization algorithm. Specifically, we consider a…
The purpose of this work is to transport the information from multiple randomized controlled trials to the target population where we only have the control group data. Previous works rely critically on the mean exchangeability assumption.…
We consider the asymptotic properties of the Synthetic Control (SC) estimator when both the number of pre-treatment periods and control units are large. If potential outcomes follow a linear factor model, we provide conditions under which…
This article studies the benefits of using spatially randomized experimental designs which partition the experimental area into distinct, non-overlapping units with treatments assigned randomly. Such designs offer improved policy evaluation…
We consider an experimental design setting in which units are assigned to treatment after being sampled sequentially from an infinite population. We derive asymptotic efficiency bounds that apply to data from any experiment that assigns…
Clinical trials are typically run in order to understand the effects of a new treatment on a given population of patients. However, patients in large populations rarely respond the same way to the same treatment. This heterogeneity in…
This paper considers the estimation of treatment effects in randomized experiments with complex experimental designs, including cases with interference between units. We develop a design-based estimation theory for arbitrary experimental…
The goal of a well-controlled study is to remove unwanted variation when estimating the causal effect of the intervention of interest. Experiments conducted in the basic sciences frequently achieve this goal using experimental controls,…
A common approach to constructing a Synthetic Control unit is to fit on the outcome variable and covariates in pre-treatment time periods, but it has been shown by Ferman and Pinto (2019) that this approach does not provide asymptotic…
To infer the treatment effect for a single treated unit using panel data, synthetic control methods construct a linear combination of control units' outcomes that mimics the treated unit's pre-treatment outcome trajectory. This linear…
Controlled experiments are widely used in many applications to investigate the causal relationship between input factors and experimental outcomes. A completely randomized design is usually used to randomly assign treatment levels to…