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Related papers: Synthetic Controls for Experimental Design

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Estimating the effects of interventions in networks is complicated when the units are interacting, such that the outcomes for one unit may depend on the treatment assignment and behavior of many or all other units (i.e., there is…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-08-15 Dean Eckles , Brian Karrer , Johan Ugander

In this article we propose a set of simple principles to guide empirical practice in synthetic control studies. The proposed principles follow from formal properties of synthetic control estimators, and pertain to the nature, implications,…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-15 Alberto Abadie , Jaume Vives-i-Bastida

We introduce a synthetic control methodology to study policies with staggered adoption. Many policies, such as the board gender diversity policies, are replicated by other policy setters at different time frames. Our method estimates the…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-11-18 Jianfei Cao , Shirley Lu , Hang Wu

Understanding treatment effect heterogeneity has become increasingly important in many fields. In this paper we study distributions and quantiles of individual treatment effects to provide a more comprehensive and robust understanding of…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-31 Zhe Chen , Xinran Li

A/B tests, also known as randomized controlled experiments (RCTs), are the gold standard for evaluating the impact of new policies, products, or decisions. However, these tests can be costly in terms of time and resources, potentially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-03 Shima Nassiri , Mohsen Bayati , Joe Cooprider

Synthetic control (SC) methods are commonly used to estimate the treatment effect on a single treated unit in panel data settings. An SC is a weighted average of control units built to match the treated unit, with weights typically…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-02-21 Xu Shi , Kendrick Li , Wang Miao , Mengtong Hu , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Randomized clinical trials are the gold standard when estimating the average treatment effect. However, they are usually not a random sample from the real-world population because of the inclusion/exclusion rules. Meanwhile, observational…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-12-11 Kuan Jiang , Wenjie Hu , Shu Yang , Xinxing Lai , Xiaohua Zhou

We propose principled prediction intervals to quantify the uncertainty of a large class of synthetic control predictions (or estimators) in settings with staggered treatment adoption, offering precise non-asymptotic coverage probability…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-02-04 Matias D. Cattaneo , Yingjie Feng , Filippo Palomba , Rocio Titiunik

Estimation and inference procedures for synthetic control methods often do not allow for the existence of spillover effects, which are plausible in many applications. In this paper, we consider estimation and inference for synthetic control…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-01-23 Jianfei Cao , Connor Dowd

Synthetic control methods are widely used to estimate the treatment effect on a single treated unit in time-series settings. A common approach to estimate synthetic control weights is to regress the treated unit's pre-treatment outcome and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-06 Chan Park , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

In this paper, a Bayesian approach is developed for simultaneously comparing multiple experimental treatments with a common control treatment in an exploratory clinical trial. The sample size is set to ensure that, at the end of the study,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-11-14 John Whitehead , Faye Cleary , Amanda Turner

The synthetic control method (SCM) is a popular approach for estimating the impact of a treatment on a single unit with panel data. Two challenges arise with higher frequency data (e.g., monthly versus yearly): (1) achieving excellent…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-04-16 Liyang Sun , Eli Ben-Michael , Avi Feller

We generalize the synthetic control (SC) method to a multiple-outcome framework, where the conventional pre-treatment time dimension is supplemented with the extra dimension of related outcomes in computing the SC weights. This…

General Economics · Economics 2024-07-29 Wei Tian , Seojeong Lee , Valentyn Panchenko

We propose a generalization of the synthetic control and interventions methods to the setting with dynamic treatment effects. We consider the estimation of unit-specific treatment effects from panel data collected under a general treatment…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-10-03 Anish Agarwal , Sukjin Han , Dwaipayan Saha , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Haeyeon Yoon

Randomized saturation designs are a family of designs which assign a possibly different treatment proportion to each cluster of a population at random. As a result, they generalize the well-known (stratified) completely randomized designs…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-21 Chencheng Cai , Jean Pouget-Abadie , Edoardo M. Airoldi

Design-based frameworks of uncertainty are frequently used in settings where the treatment is (conditionally) randomly assigned. This paper develops a design-based framework suitable for analyzing quasi-experimental settings in the social…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-06-17 Ashesh Rambachan , Jonathan Roth

Randomized experiments are the gold standard for estimating the causal effects of an intervention. In the simplest setting, each experimental unit is randomly assigned to receive treatment or control, and then the outcomes in each treatment…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-05 Guillaume Basse , Yi Ding , Panos Toulis

This paper considers the problem of design-based inference for the average treatment effect in finely stratified experiments. Here, by "design-based'' we mean that the only source of uncertainty stems from the randomness in treatment…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-05-08 Yuehao Bai , Xun Huang , Joseph P. Romano , Azeem M. Shaikh , Max Tabord-Meehan

We develop new semiparametric methods for estimating treatment effects. We focus on settings where the outcome distributions may be thick tailed, where treatment effects may be small, where sample sizes are large and where assignment is…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-24 Susan Athey , Peter J. Bickel , Aiyou Chen , Guido W. Imbens , Michael Pollmann

Synthetic Control methods have recently gained considerable attention in applications with only one treated unit. Their popularity is partly based on the key insight that we can predict good synthetic counterfactuals for our treated unit.…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-07-15 Tzvetan Moev