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Related papers: Synthetic Controls with Multiple Outcomes

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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

Synthetic control methods can produce misleading counterfactual predictions when outcome series contain unit-specific stochastic trends, a common feature of nonstationary macroeconomic data. Existing remedies, such as pre-filtering or…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-21 Ziyi Liu , Yiqing Xu

Social scientists often study how a policy reform impacted a single targeted country. Increasingly, this is done with the synthetic control method (SCM). SCM models the country's counterfactual (non-reform or untreated) trajectory as a…

Applications · Statistics 2019-10-15 Elias Tuomaala

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 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…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-02-23 Billy Ferguson , Brad Ross

The Synthetic Control method (SC) has become a valuable tool for estimating causal effects. Originally designed for single-treated unit scenarios, it has recently found applications in high-dimensional disaggregated settings with multiple…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-28 Ye Shen , Rui Song , Alberto Abadie

In this short note, I outline conditions under which conditioning on Synthetic Control (SC) weights emulates a randomized control trial where the treatment status is independent of potential outcomes. Specifically, I demonstrate that if…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-04 Harsh Parikh

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-09 Matias D. Cattaneo , Yingjie Feng , Rocio Titiunik

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

The synthetic control method (SCM) has become a popular tool for estimating causal effects in policy evaluation, where a single treated unit is observed, and a heterogeneous set of untreated units with pre- and post-policy change data are…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-21 Jizhou Liu , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen , Carlos Varjão

Mixed-frequency data, where variables are observed at different temporal resolutions, commonly occur in economic and financial studies. Classical synthetic control methods (SCM) are ill-suited for such data, often necessitating aggregation…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-13 Lu Zhang , Shijin Gong , Xinyu Zhang

This article studies experimental design in settings where the experimental units are large aggregate entities (e.g., markets), and only one or a small number of units can be exposed to the treatment. In such settings, randomization of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-24 Alberto Abadie , Jinglong Zhao

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

The synthetic control method (SCM) is widely used for constructing the counterfactual of a treated unit based on data from control units in a donor pool. Allowing the donor pool contains more control units than time periods, we propose a…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-19 Chengwang Liao , Zhentao Shi , Yapeng Zheng

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

The synthetic control (SC) method is a popular approach for estimating treatment effects from observational panel data. It rests on a crucial assumption that we can write the treated unit as a linear combination of the untreated units. This…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-02-27 Achille Nazaret , Claudia Shi , David M. Blei

Iterative Synthetic Control Method is introduced in this study, a modification of the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) designed to improve its predictive performance by utilizing control units affected by the treatment in question. This…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-05-06 Andrii Melnychuk

The Synthetic Control method has pioneered a class of powerful data-driven techniques to estimate the counterfactual reality of a unit from donor units. At its core, the technique involves a linear model fitted on the pre-intervention…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Bhishma Dedhia , Roshini Balasubramanian , Niraj K. Jha

This article extends the widely-used synthetic controls estimator for evaluating causal effects of policy changes to quantile functions. The proposed method provides a geometrically faithful estimate of the entire counterfactual quantile…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-01-03 Florian Gunsilius

Many macroeconomic policy questions may be assessed in a case study framework, where the time series of a treated unit is compared to a counterfactual constructed from a large pool of control units. I provide a general framework for this…

Econometrics · Economics 2018-03-02 Daniel Kinn