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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 generalization of the synthetic controls and synthetic interventions methodology to incorporate network interference. We consider the estimation of unit-specific potential outcomes from panel data in the presence of spillover…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-10-13 Anish Agarwal , Sarah H. Cen , Devavrat Shah , Christina Lee Yu

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

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

Popular empirical strategies for policy evaluation in the panel data literature -- including difference-in-differences (DID), synthetic control (SC) methods, and their variants -- rely on key identifying assumptions that can be expressed…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-11-11 Yiqi Liu

This paper investigates the use of synthetic control methods for causal inference in macroeconomic settings when dealing with possibly nonstationary data. While the synthetic control approach has gained popularity for estimating…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-05-29 Zhentao Shi , Jin Xi , Haitian Xie

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

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…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-11-23 Oscar Engelbrektson

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

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

Synthetic control methods often rely on matching pre-treatment characteristics (called predictors) of the treated unit. The choice of predictors and how they are weighted plays a key role in the performance and interpretability of synthetic…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-02 Jaume Vives-i-Bastida

We analyze the synthetic control (SC) method in panel data settings with many units. We assume the treatment assignment is based on unobserved heterogeneity and pre-treatment information, allowing for both strictly and sequentially…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-12-27 Dmitry Arkhangelsky , David Hirshberg

Accurately quantifying geo-level marketing lift in two-sided marketplaces is challenging: the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) often exhibits high power yet systematically under-estimates effect size, while panel-style Double Machine Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Sang Su Lee , Vineeth Loganathan , Vijay Raghavan

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…

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

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

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

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

The synthetic control method offers a way to quantify the effect of an intervention using weighted averages of untreated units to approximate the counterfactual outcome that the treated unit(s) would have experienced in the absence of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-12 Matias D. Cattaneo , Yingjie Feng , Filippo Palomba , Rocio Titiunik

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