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The synthetic control method (SCM) estimates causal effects in panel data with a single-treated unit by constructing a counterfactual outcome as a weighted combination of untreated control units that matches the pre-treatment trajectory. In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-13 Yuxin Wang , Dennis Frauen , Emil Javurek , Konstantin Hess , Yuchen Ma , Stefan Feuerriegel

The synthetic control method (SCM) is a popular approach for estimating the impact of a treatment on a single unit in panel data settings. The "synthetic control" is a weighted average of control units that balances the treated unit's…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-07-24 Eli Ben-Michael , Avi Feller , Jesse Rothstein

Difference-in-Differences (DiD) and Synthetic Control (SC) are widely used methods for causal inference in panel data, each with distinct strengths and limitations. We propose a novel method for short-panel causal inference that integrates…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-09-26 Yixiao Sun , Haitian Xie , Yuhang Zhang

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 analyze the properties of the Synthetic Control (SC) and related estimators when the pre-treatment fit is imperfect. In this framework, we show that these estimators are generally biased if treatment assignment is correlated with…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-01-13 Bruno Ferman , Cristine Pinto

The synthetic control method (SCM) is widely used for causal inference with panel data, particularly when the number of treated units is small. It relies on the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA), ruling out spillover effects.…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-03-26 Shosei Sakaguchi , Hayato Tagawa

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…

Applications · Statistics 2017-09-21 Nikolay Doudchenko , Guido W. Imbens

Synthetic control (SC) methods have gained rapid popularity in economics recently, where they have been applied in the context of inferring the effects of treatments on standard continuous outcomes assuming linear input-output relations. In…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-19 Alicia Curth , Hoifung Poon , Aditya V. Nori , Javier González

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…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-05-27 Bruno Ferman

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…

This paper reinterprets the Synthetic Control (SC) framework through the lens of weighting philosophy, arguing that the contrast between traditional SC and Difference-in-Differences (DID) reflects two distinct modeling mindsets: sparse…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-31 Le Wang , Xin Xing , Youhui Ye

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-01-19 Eli Ben-Michael , Avi Feller , Jesse Rothstein

This paper provides new insights into the asymptotic properties of the synthetic control method (SCM). We show that the synthetic control (SC) weight converges to a limiting weight that minimizes the mean squared prediction risk of the…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-11-23 Xiaomeng Zhang , Wendun Wang , Xinyu Zhang

In this paper, we adopt results in nonlinear time series analysis for causal inference in dynamical settings.~Our motivation is policy analysis with panel data, particularly through the use of "synthetic control" methods. These methods…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-03-03 Yi Ding , Panos Toulis

Synthetic control is a causal inference tool used to estimate the treatment effects of an intervention by creating synthetic counterfactual data. This approach combines measurements from other similar observations (i.e., donor pool ) to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-27 Saeyoung Rho , Rachel Cummings , Vishal Misra

Synthetic control methods (SCMs) are a canonical approach used to estimate treatment effects from panel data in the internet economy. We shed light on a frequently overlooked but ubiquitous assumption made in SCMs of "overlap": a treated…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-02-26 Daniel Ngo , Keegan Harris , Anish Agarwal , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Zhiwei Steven Wu

The synthetic control method estimates the causal effect by comparing the treated unit's outcomes to a weighted average of control units that closely match its pre-treatment outcomes, assuming the relationship between treated and control…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-07 Taehyeon Koo , Zijian Guo

In this paper, we propose a novel method for causal inference within the framework of counterfactual and synthetic control. Matching forward the generalized synthetic control method, our instrumented principal component analysis method…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-09-17 Cong Wang

The synthetic control method (SCM) is a widely used tool for evaluating causal effects of policy changes in panel data settings. Recent studies have extended its framework to accommodate complex outcomes that take values in metric spaces,…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-13 Ryo Okano , Daisuke Kurisu

We introduce new inference procedures for counterfactual and synthetic control methods for policy evaluation. We recast the causal inference problem as a counterfactual prediction and a structural breaks testing problem. This allows us to…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-01-26 Victor Chernozhukov , Kaspar Wüthrich , Yinchu Zhu