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The Augmented Synthetic Control Method
Open accessAbstract
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 pretreatment outcomes and other covariates as closely as possible. A critical feature of the original proposal is to use SCM only when the fit on pretreatment outcomes is excellent. We propose Augmented SCM as an extension of SCM to settings where such pretreatment fit is infeasible. Analogous to bias correction for inexact matching, augmented SCM uses an outcome model to estimate the bias due to imperfect pretreatment fit and then de-biases the original SCM estimate. Our main proposal, which uses ridge regression as the outcome model, directly controls pretreatment fit while minimizing extrapolation from the convex hull. This estimator can also be expressed as a solution to a modified synthetic controls problem that allows negative weights on some donor units. We bound the estimation error of this approach under different data-generating processes, including a linear factor model, and show how regularization helps to avoid over-fitting to noise. We demonstrate gains from Augmented SCM with extensive simulation studies and apply this framework to estimate the impact of the 2012 Kansas tax cuts on economic growth. We implement the proposed method in the new augsynth R package.
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“We followed standard practice for placebo tests, conducting in-space and in-time tests.40,42,43”
From The Peacemaker Fellowship and Urban Gun Violence in Richmond, California (2026) · cites this paper as [40]
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“This underscores the importance of the recommendation in Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller (2010, 2015) to use SCM only in settings with excellent pretreatment fit.”
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Metadata
- Authors
- Ben-Michael, E., Feller, A., & Rothstein, J.
- Affiliations
- Department of Statistics, Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, Harvard University
- University of California System (US)
- Corresponding author
- Feller, Avi
- Venue
- Journal of the American Statistical Association
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2021-07-29
- Volume
- 116
- Issue
- 536
- Pages
- 1789-1803
- ISSN
- 0162-1459 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-274X
- OpenAlex
- W3123564515
- Cited by
- 462
- References
- 42
- Citations by year
- 2026: 93 · 2025: 110 · 2024: 79 · 2023: 69 · 2022: 58 · 2021: 33
- FWCI
- 44.66
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Locations
- Journal of the American Statistical Association (publishedVersion)
- National Bureau of Economic Research (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- National Bureau of Economic Research (submittedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Figshare (cc-by)
- Funders
- Institute of Education Sciences (R305D200010)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Statistics and Probability › Advanced Causal Inference Techniques
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Spatial and Panel Data Analysis
- Social Sciences › Public Administration › Evaluation and Performance Assessment
- Keywords
- synthetic control method, treatment effect estimation, bias correction, ridge regression, factor models, regularization, overfitting, economic growth
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