When researchers develop new econometric methods it is common practice to compare the performance of the new methods to those of existing methods in Monte Carlo studies. The credibility of such Monte Carlo studies is often limited because of the freedom the researcher has in choosing the design....

When researchers develop new econometric methods it is common practice to compare the performance of the new methods to those of existing methods in Monte Carlo studies. The credibility of such Monte Carlo studies is often limited because of the freedom the researcher has in choosing the design....

In this paper we study estimation of and inference for average treatment effects in a setting with panel data. We focus on the setting where units, e.g., individuals, firms, or states, adopt the policy or treatment of interest at a particular point in time, and then remain exposed to this...

In this paper we study methods for estimating causal effects in settings with panel data, where a subset of units are exposed to a treatment during a subset of periods, and the goal is estimating counterfactual (untreated) outcomes for the treated unit/period combinations. We develop a class of...

In many prediction problems researchers have found that combinations of prediction methods (“ensembles”) perform better than individual methods. A simple example is random forests, which combines predictions from many regression trees.A striking, and substantially more complex, example is...

We present a new perspective on the Synthetic Control (SC) method as a weighted least squares regression estimator with time fixed effects and unit weights. This perspective suggests a generalization with two way (both unit and time) fixed effects, and both unit and time weights, which can be...

This paper develops an alternative approach to the widely used Difference-In-Difference (DID) method for evaluating the effects of policy changes. In contrast to the standard approach, we introduce a nonlinear model that permits changes over time in the effect of unobservables (e.g., there may...