Asymptotically Unbiased Synthetic Control Methods by Distribution Matching

Masahiro Kato, Akari Ohda and Masaaki Imaizumi

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Abstract: Synthetic Control Methods (SCMs) have become an essential tool for comparative case studies. The fundamental idea of SCMs is to estimate the counterfactual outcomes of a treated unit using a weighted sum of the observed outcomes of untreated units. The accuracy of the synthetic control (SC) is critical for evaluating the treatment effect of a policy intervention; therefore, the estimation of SC weights has been the focus of extensive research. In this study, we first point out that existing SCMs suffer from an endogeneity problem, the correlation between the outcomes of untreated units and the error term of the synthetic control, which yields a bias in the treatment effect estimator. We then propose a novel SCM based on density matching, assuming that the density of outcomes of the treated unit can be approximated by a weighted average of the joint density of untreated units (i.e., a mixture model). Based on this assumption, we estimate SC weights by matching the moments of treated outcomes with the weighted sum of moments of untreated outcomes. Our proposed method has three advantages over existing methods: first, our estimator is asymptotically unbiased under the assumption of the mixture model; second, due to the asymptotic unbiasedness, we can reduce the mean squared error in counterfactual predictions; third, our method generates full densities of the treatment effect, not merely expected values, which broadens the applicability of SCMs. We provide experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Date: 2023-07, Revised 2024-05
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