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Related papers: Difference-in-Differences Meets Synthetic Control:…

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This paper studies inference on treatment effects in panel data settings with unobserved confounding. We model outcome variables through a factor model with random factors and loadings. Such factors and loadings may act as unobserved…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-12-05 Guido W. Imbens , Davide Viviano

The difference-in-differences (DID) design is one of the most popular methods used in empirical economics research. However, there is almost no work examining what the DID method identifies in the presence of a misclassified treatment…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-01 Augustine Denteh , Désiré Kédagni

We provide a simple distribution regression estimator for treatment effects in the difference-in-differences (DiD) design. Our procedure is particularly useful when the treatment effect differs across the distribution of the outcome…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-20 Iván Fernández-Val , Jonas Meier , Aico van Vuuren , Francis Vella

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

We propose a new method for estimating causal effects in longitudinal/panel data settings that we call generalized difference-in-differences. Our approach unifies two alternative approaches in these settings: ignorability estimators (e.g.,…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-12 Denis Agniel , Max Rubinstein , Jessie Coe , Maria DeYoreo

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

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-20 Robert Pickett , Jennifer Hill , Sarah Cowan

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

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-15 Claudia Shi , Dhanya Sridhar , Vishal Misra , David M. Blei

Difference-in-Differences (DiD) is a widely used research design that often relies on a conditional parallel trends (CPT) assumption. In contrast to settings with unconfoundedness, where causal graphs provide powerful frameworks for…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-04-15 Michael C. Knaus , Henri Pfleiderer

We present a new estimator for causal effects with panel data that builds on insights behind the widely used difference in differences and synthetic control methods. Relative to these methods we find, both theoretically and empirically,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-22 Dmitry Arkhangelsky , Susan Athey , David A. Hirshberg , Guido W. Imbens , Stefan Wager

In this paper, we describe a computational implementation of the Synthetic difference-in-differences (SDID) estimator of Arkhangelsky et al. (2021) for Stata. Synthetic difference-in-differences can be used in a wide class of circumstances…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-02-14 Damian Clarke , Daniel Pailañir , Susan Athey , Guido Imbens

Applied Difference-in-Differences studies often involve outcomes that are discrete, mixed, censored, or otherwise non-continuously distributed, while policy questions frequently concern distributional effects rather than mean effects alone.…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-22 Nelly K. Djuazon , Emmanuel Selorm Tsyawo

While a randomized control trial is considered the gold standard for estimating causal treatment effects, there are many research settings in which randomization is infeasible or unethical. In such cases, researchers rely on analytical…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-21 Julia C. Thome , Peter F. Rebeiro , Andrew J. Spieker , Bryan E. Shepherd

As an alternative to synthetic control, the distributional Synthetic Control (DSC) proposed by Gunsilius (2023) provides estimates for quantile treatment effect and thus enabling researchers to comprehensively understand the impact of…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-12 Lu Zhang , Xiaomeng Zhang , Xinyu Zhang

In this paper, we propose a new approach to causal inference with panel data. Instead of using panel data to adjust for differences in the distribution of unobserved heterogeneity between the treated and comparison groups, we instead use…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-12-01 Brantly Callaway , Derek Dyal , Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna , Emmanuel S. Tsyawo

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

This paper develops doubly robust estimators for direct (DATT) and spillover (SATT) average treatment effects on the treated in network-based difference-in-differences (DiD) designs. Unlike standard DiD methods, the proposed approach…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-30 Kuan Sun , Zhiguo Xiao

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are widely regarded as the gold standard for causal inference in biomedical research. For instance, when estimating the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT), a doubly robust estimation procedure…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-26 Chi-Shian Dai , Chao Ying , Yang Ning , Jiwei Zhao

This paper studies staggered Difference-in-Differences (DiD) design when there is a second event confounding the target event. When the events are correlated, the treatment and the control group are unevenly exposed to the effects of the…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-01-22 Lin-Tung Tsai