Description
Distributional Synthetic Controls Estimation.
Description
The method of synthetic controls is a widely-adopted tool for evaluating causal effects of policy changes in settings with observational data. In many settings where it is applicable, researchers want to identify causal effects of policy changes on a treated unit at an aggregate level while having access to data at a finer granularity. This package implements a simple extension of the synthetic controls estimator, developed in Gunsilius (2023) <doi:10.3982/ECTA18260>, that takes advantage of this additional structure and provides nonparametric estimates of the heterogeneity within the aggregate unit. The idea is to replicate the quantile function associated with the treated unit by a weighted average of quantile functions of the control units. The package contains tools for aggregating and plotting the resulting distributional estimates, as well as for carrying out inference on them.
README.md
DiSCos
The DiSCos package contains tools for computing counterfactual quantile functions in a Distributional Synthetic Controls (DiSco) setting, following the method proposed in Gunsilius (2023).
Getting Started
Have a look at the vignette replicating the empirical application in the paper to get started.
Installation
To install the latest stable version, run
install.packages("DiSCos")
You can install latest development version from GitHub with:
devtools::install_github("Davidvandijcke/DiSCos")
If you find any bugs or have any questions, please email [email protected].
Gunsilius, Florian F. 2023. “Distributional Synthetic Controls.” Econometrica 91 (3): 1105–17.