DiSCo_mixture

The alternative mixture of distributions approach in the paper

internal

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.

David Van Dijcke

DiSCos

Distributional Synthetic Controls Estimation

Florian Gunsilius

Siyun He

DiSCo_mixture function

<dl><dt>controls1</dt>
<dd>A list of controls</dd>
<dt>target</dt>
<dd>The target unit</dd>
<dt>grid.min</dt>
<dd>Minimal value of the grid on which the CDFs are evaluated.</dd>
<dt>grid.max</dt>
<dd>Maximal value of the grid on which the CDFs are evaluated.</dd>
<dt>grid.rand</dt>
<dd>Random grid on which the CDFs are evaluated.</dd>
<dt>M</dt>
<dd>Integer indicating the number of control quantiles to use in the DiSCo method. Default is 1000.</dd>
<dt>simplex</dt>
<dd>Logical, indicating whether to use to constrain the optimal weights to the unit simplex. Default is FALSE, which only constrains the weights to sum up to 1 but allows them to be negative.</dd></dl>

Arguments

DiSCo_mixture — DiSCo_mixture

<dl>

<dt>controls1</dt>
<dd>A list of controls</dd>


<dt>target</dt>
<dd>The target unit</dd>


<dt>grid.min</dt>
<dd>Minimal value of the grid on which the CDFs are evaluated.</dd>


<dt>grid.max</dt>
<dd>Maximal value of the grid on which the CDFs are evaluated.</dd>


<dt>grid.rand</dt>
<dd>Random grid on which the CDFs are evaluated.</dd>


<dt>M</dt>
<dd>Integer indicating the number of control quantiles to use in the DiSCo method. Default is 1000.</dd>


<dt>simplex</dt>
<dd>Logical, indicating whether to use to constrain the optimal weights to the unit simplex. Default is FALSE, which only constrains the weights to sum up to 1 but allows them to be negative.</dd>

</dl>

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DiSCo_mixture: DiSCo_mixture

Description

Usage

Value

Arguments