Comparative Politics and the Synthetic Control Method

TL;DR: For example, when reformers tinker with multiple institutions, the likely effect of each individual individual change may be well understood, but their effects may not always be understood as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: Findings indicate the CWIs had a positive impact on teen birth rates and have the potential to address racial and ethnic disparities in those rates.

TL;DR: In 2014, the most prominent anti-corruption investigation in Latin America called Lava Jato, exposed a Brazilian corruption scheme with reverberations in 61 countries, resulting in legal judgments.

Abstract: 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 unbiasedness when the fit is imperfect and the number of controls is fixed. Many related panel methods have a similar limitation when the number of units is fixed. I introduce and evaluate a new method in which the Synthetic Control is constructed using a General Method of Moments approach where units not being included in the Synthetic Control are used as instruments. I show that a Synthetic Control Estimator of this form will be asymptotically unbiased as the number of pre-treatment time periods goes to infinity, even when pre-treatment fit is imperfect and the number of units is fixed. Furthermore, if both the number of pre-treatment and post-treatment time periods go to infinity, then averages of treatment effects can be consistently estimated. I conduct simulations and an empirical application to compare the performance of this method with existing approaches in the literature.

TL;DR: For instance, King, Keohane, Verba, and Verba as mentioned in this paper have developed a unified approach to valid descriptive and causal inference in qualitative research, where numerical measurement is either impossible or undesirable.

TL;DR: Case Study Research: Principles and Practices as mentioned in this paper provides a general understanding of the case study method as well as specific tools for its successful implementation, which are applicable in a variety of fields including anthropology, business and management, communications, economics, education, medicine, political science, psychology, social work, and sociology.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the applicability of synthetic control methods to comparative case studies and found that, following Proposition 99, tobacco consumption fell markedly in California relative to a comparable synthetic control region, and that by the year 2000 annual per-capita cigarette sales in California were about 26 packs lower than what they would have been in the absence of Proposition 99.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the economic effects of conflict, using the terrorist conflict in the Basque Country as a case study, and found that after the outbreak of terrorism in the late 1960's, per capita GDP in the basque country declined about 10 percentage points relative to a synthetic control region without terrorism.