SynthATT: Synthetic Control ATT

In mdtrinh/vietnamdata: Data and Empirical Tools for Quantitative Social Science Research on Vietnam

Description

Estimates the average treatment effect on the treated using the Synthetic Control Method, then conducts inference using randomization inference by permuting the treatment vector to obtain the sharp null distribution

Usage

SynthATT(data, outcome, treatment, covs, treatment.year, pretreatment.year,
  posttreatment.year = NULL, unit.variable, unit.names.variable,
  time.variable, include.past.Y = TRUE, snowfall = FALSE)

Arguments

data	a data frame containing the variables in the model
outcome	a character. Name of the outcome variable.
treatment	a character. Name of the treatment variable.
covs	a character vector. Names of the covariates to be used in the model.
treatment.year	the year or time period at which treatment occurs
pretreatment.year	the years or time periods before treatment occurs. Observations from these years or time periods will be used to create the synthetic contorl
posttreatment.year	the years or time periods after treatment occurs. Observations form these years or time periods will be used to calculate treatment effects.
unit.variable	A scalar identifying the column number or column-name character string associated unit numbers. The unit.varibale has to be numeric.
unit.names.variable	A scalar or column-name character string identifying the column with the names of the units. This variable has to be of mode character.
time.variable	A scalar identifying column number or column-name character string associated with period (time) data. The time variable has to be numeric.
include.past.Y	a logical; if TRUE past values of the outcomes are included as a covariate to produce the synthetic control
snowfall	a logical; if TRUE the function performs parallel computing using the snowfall package

Details

For each unit in the treatment group, Synthatt creates a synthetic control using weighted averages of the units in the control group, then estimates an unit-specific treatment effect. The Average Treatment Effect on the Treated is calculated by taking the average of all unit-specific treatment effects.

Internally, Synthatt makes use of the synth and dataprep functions in the Synth package. For computers with multiple cores, Synthatt can perform parallel computation to improve computation speed.

Value

An list with two objects: tau.i, a vector of unit-specific treatment effects, and tau.att the Average Treatment Effect on the Treated

mdtrinh/vietnamdata documentation built on May 3, 2019, 11:49 p.m.