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Synthetic Controls for Experimental Design

Alberto Abadie, Jinglong Zhao

arXiv 4 Aug 2021 · Statistics — Methodology · 1 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2108.02196 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

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 treatment may result in treated and control groups with very different characteristics at baseline, inducing biases. We propose a variety of experimental non-randomized synthetic control designs (Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller, 2010, Abadie and Gardeazabal, 2003) that select the units to be treated, as well as the untreated units to be used as a control group. Average potential outcomes are estimated as weighted averages of the outcomes of treated units for potential outcomes with treatment, and weighted averages the outcomes of control units for potential outcomes without treatment. We analyze the properties of estimators based on synthetic control designs and propose new inferential techniques. We show that in experimental settings with aggregate units, synthetic control designs can substantially reduce estimation biases in comparison to randomization of the treatment.

Citation extraction

34
references
88
in-text mentions
34
distinct cited
2
self-citations
14,914
main-text words

appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 45% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Alberto Abadie, Alexis Diamond \ Jens Hainmueller (2010) Synthetic Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies: Estimating the Effect of California’s Tobacco Control Program self0.69391100%
2Nick Doudchenko, Khashayar Khosravi, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Sebastien L… (2021) Synthetic Design: An Optimization Approach to Experimental Design with Synthetic Controls0.69391100%
3Nikolay Doudchenko, David Gilinson, Sean Taylor \ Nils Wernerfelt Designing Experiments with Synthetic Controls0.69361100%
4Alberto Abadie (2021) Using Synthetic Controls: Feasibility, Data Requirements, and Methodological Aspects self0.64441100%
5Nikolay Doudchenko \ Guido W Imbens (2016) Balancing, Regression, Difference-in-Differences and Synthetic Control Methods: A Synthesis0.64441100%
6Nick Jones \ Sam Barrows (2019) Synthetic Control and Alternatives to A/B Testing at Uber0.64441100%
7Victor Chernozhukov, Kaspar Wüthrich \ Yinchu Zhu (2021) An Exact and Robust Conformal Inference Method for Counterfactual and Synthetic Controls0.6308175%
8Alberto Abadie \ Jérémy L'Hour (2021) A Penalized Synthetic Control Estimator for Disaggregated Data0.61610170%
9Alberto Abadie \ Javier Gardeazabal (2003) The Economic Costs of Conflict: A Case Study of the Basque County0.58531100%
10Dmitry Arkhangelsky, Susan Athey, David A. Hirshberg, Guido W. Imben… (2021) Synthetic Difference-in-Differences0.58531100%

Showing the top 10 of 34 scored citations.

Cited by, within the corpus

arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1Synthetic Principal Component Design: Fast Covariate Balancing with Synthetic Controls1.000174
2Real-time Program Evaluation using Anytime-valid Rank Tests*1.000115
3A Design-Based Perspective on Synthetic Control Methods0.40511
4Estimating Effects of Long-Term Treatments0.40511
5Inference for Synthetic Controls via Refined Placebo Tests0.40511
6Data-Driven Switchback Experiments: Theoretical Tradeoffs and Empirical Bayes Designs0.40511
7Externally Valid Selection of Experimental Sites via the k-Median Problem0.40511
8Learning What to Learn: Experimental Design when Combining Experimental with Observational Evidence0.40511