Sun, Liyang;
Ben-Michael, Eli;
Feller, Avi;
(2025)
Using Multiple Outcomes to Improve the Synthetic Control Method.
Review of Economics and Statistics
10.1162/rest_a_01592.
(In press).
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Abstract
When there are multiple outcome series of interest, Synthetic Control analyses typically proceed by estimating separate weights for each outcome. In this paper, we instead propose estimating a common set of weights across outcomes, by balancing either a vector of all outcomes or an index or average of them. Under a low-rank factor model, we show that these approaches lead to lower bias bounds than separate weights, and that averaging leads to further gains when the number of outcomes grows. We illustrate this via a re-analysis of the impact of the Flint water crisis on educational outcomes.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Using Multiple Outcomes to Improve the Synthetic Control Method |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1162/rest_a_01592 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01592 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2025 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode |
| Keywords: | panel data, synthetic control method, linear factor model C13, C21, C23 |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Economics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10205560 |
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