Papers › Debiasing and t-tests for synthetic control inference on average causal effects

Debiasing and t-tests for synthetic control inference on average causal effects

27 Dec 2018arXiv:1812.10820archive 2025-07-28

Victor Chernozhukov, Kaspar Wuthrich, Yinchu Zhu

We propose a practical and robust method for making inferences on average treatment effects estimated by synthetic controls. We develop a K-fold cross-fitting procedure for bias correction. To avoid the difficult estimation of the long-run variance, inference is based on a self-normalized t-statistic, which has an asymptotically pivotal t-distribution. Our t-test is easy to implement, provably robust against misspecification, and valid with stationary and non-stationary data. It demonstrates an excellent small sample performance in application-based simulations and performs well relative to other methods. We illustrate the usefulness of the t-test by revisiting the effect of carbon taxes on emissions.

PaperPDFCode

Code

kwuthrich/scinference officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections