Synthetic Controls with Multiple Outcomes: Theory and Applications
with Wei Tian (UNSW) and Valentyn Panchenko (UNSW)
We generalize the synthetic control (SC) method to a multiple-outcome framework, where the conventional pre-treatment time dimension is supplemented with the extra dimension of related outcomes in computing the SC weights. This generalization improves the reliability of treatment effect estimation, and can be particularly useful for evaluating the effect of a treatment on multiple outcomes or when only a small number of pre-treatment periods are available. To illustrate our method, we provide a new perspective on the classic SC application to the 1990 German reunification.