Related papers: Are Synthetic Control Weights Balancing Score?
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
Synthetic Control Methods (SCMs) have become a fundamental tool for comparative case studies. The core idea behind SCMs is to estimate treatment effects by predicting counterfactual outcomes for a treated unit using a weighted combination…
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…
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…
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) face inherent limitations, such as ethical or resource constraints, which lead to a limited number of study participants. To address these limitations, recent research endeavors have sought to incorporate…
We propose a sensitivity analysis for Synthetic Control (SC) treatment effect estimates to interrogate the assumption that the SC method is well-specified, namely that choosing weights to minimize pre-treatment prediction error yields…
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…
Estimating weights in the synthetic control method, typically resulting in sparse weights where only a few control units have non-zero weights, involves an optimization procedure that selects and combines control units to closely match the…
Synthetic control (SC) methods have been widely applied to estimate the causal effect of large-scale interventions, e.g., the state-wide effect of a change in policy. The idea of synthetic controls is to approximate one unit's…
Uncertainty quantification is a fundamental problem in the analysis and interpretation of synthetic control (SC) methods. We develop conditional prediction intervals in the SC framework, and provide conditions under which these intervals…
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…
A benefit of randomized experiments is that covariate distributions of treatment and control groups are balanced on average, resulting in simple unbiased estimators for treatment effects. However, it is possible that a particular…
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…
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…