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Related papers: Correlated Synthetic Controls

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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

Estimation and inference procedures for synthetic control methods often do not allow for the existence of spillover effects, which are plausible in many applications. In this paper, we consider estimation and inference for synthetic control…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-01-23 Jianfei Cao , Connor Dowd

When evaluating the impact of a policy on a metric of interest, it may not be possible to conduct a randomized control trial. In settings where only observational data is available, Synthetic Control (SC) methods provide a popular…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-09-24 Muhummad Amjad , Vishal Misra , Devavrat Shah , Dennis Shen

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

The synthetic control (SC) framework is widely used for observational causal inference with time-series panel data. SC has been successful in diverse applications, but existing methods typically treat the ordering of pre-intervention time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Saeyoung Rho , Cyrus Illick , Samhitha Narasipura , Alberto Abadie , Daniel Hsu , Vishal Misra

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

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

The generation of synthetic data is an essential tool to study complex systems, allowing for example to test models of these in precisely controlled settings, or to parametrize simulation models when data is missing. This paper focuses on…

Applications · Statistics 2019-11-25 Juste Raimbault

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

We present a robust generalization of the synthetic control method for comparative case studies. Like the classical method, we present an algorithm to estimate the unobservable counterfactual of a treatment unit. A distinguishing feature of…

Econometrics · Economics 2017-11-21 Muhammad Jehangir Amjad , Devavrat Shah , Dennis Shen

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

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 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…

General Economics · Economics 2024-07-29 Wei Tian , Seojeong Lee , Valentyn Panchenko

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

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

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 average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) in a staggered-adoption panel is estimated using an intercept-augmented synthetic-control (SCM) estimator. A weighted parallel trends plus an intercept shift, together with mild regularity…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-08 Michael Guggisberg

A common approach to constructing a Synthetic Control unit is to fit on the outcome variable and covariates in pre-treatment time periods, but it has been shown by Ferman and Pinto (2019) that this approach does not provide asymptotic…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-03-07 Joseph Fry

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

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