arXiv 11 Jul 2025 · Econometrics
arXiv:2507.08918 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
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. However, this insight of predicting counterfactuals is generalisable to microeconometric settings where we often observe many treated units. We propose the Correlated Synthetic Controls (CSC) estimator for such situations: intuitively, it creates synthetic controls that are correlated across individuals with similar observables. When treatment assignment is correlated with unobservables, we show that the CSC estimator has more desirable theoretical properties than the difference-in-differences estimator. We also utilise CSC in practice to obtain heterogeneous treatment effects in the well-known Mariel Boatlift study, leveraging additional information from the PSID.
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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.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | D. Card (1990) The impact of the mariel boatlift on the miami labor market | 1.000 | 7 | 3 | 100% |
| 2 | G. Peri and V. Yasenov (2018) The labor market effects of a refugee wave | 1.000 | 6 | 3 | 100% |
| 3 | D. Arkhangelsky, S. Athey, D. A. Hirshberg, G. W. Imbens, and S. Wager (1812) Synthetic difference in differences | 1.000 | 5 | 3 | 100% |
| 4 | G. J. Borjas (2017) The wage impact of the marielitos: A reappraisal | 0.956 | 8 | 3 | 88% |
| 5 | E. Ben-Michael, A. Feller, and J. Rothstein (1912) Synthetic controls with staggered adoption | 0.941 | 12 | 4 | 83% |
| 6 | A. Abadie and J. L'Hour (2020) A penalized synthetic control estimator for disaggregated data | 0.916 | 13 | 5 | 77% |
| 7 | A. Abadie, A. Diamond, and J. Hainmueller (2010) Synthetic control methods for comparative case studies: Estimating the effect of california’s tobacco control program | 0.902 | 15 | 7 | 73% |
| 8 | B. Ferman and C. Pinto (1911) Synthetic controls with imperfect pre-treatment fit | 0.874 | 6 | 3 | 67% |
| 9 | I. Botosaru and B. Ferman (2019) On the role of covariates in the synthetic control method | 0.830 | 7 | 3 | 57% |
| 10 | N. Doudchenko and G. Imbens Balancing, regression, difference-in-differences and synthetic control methods: A synthesis | 0.763 | 6 | 2 | 67% |
Showing the top 10 of 57 scored citations.