The Center for the Study of Democratic Citizenship is happy to presents:
7th CSDC Method Winter School
Fernando Feitosa, Implementing a synthetic control model in R: A guide*
*the workshop will be in French
When: February 17, 2021, from 1pm to 2:30pm.
Registration: If you are interested in participating in one or several of the Winter School workshops, you need to register. Please register here at least 2 days before the workshop.
About: Difference-in-differences represent one of the most common methods for estimating causal effects. However, it is often the case that the parallel trends assumption is violated, in this way preventing a reliable estimation of causal effects through a difference-in-differences approach. Aware of this, in 2010, Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller proposed a new statistical modeling approach that allows for creating a synthetic control from portions of different control units. This synthetic control will more perfectly match the treated unit prior to the treatment than the original control units. As such, the “synthetic control” model has been used in various research, such as on the political consequences from natural disasters (Katz and Levin 2016) and compulsory voting rules (Bechtel, Hangartner, and Schmid 2018; Fowler 2013; Singh 2019). Inspired bymy own use of the “synthetic control” model (Feitosa, Blais, and Dassonneville. 2020), I will teach participants in this workshop how to easily implement a synthetic control model in R. In addition, they will leave the workshop knowing what is a “synthetic control” model and the (many) advantages and (few) disadvantages of this approach for causal analysis. No prior knowledge of this topic is expected from participants.
Proposed plan of the workshop:
- What is a synthetic control model
- Implementing a synthetic control model in R
- The advantages and disadvantages of a synthetic control model for causal analysis
Full schedule and more details about each workshops of the Winter School available here.