Counterfactual Analysis With Artificial Controls: Inference, High Dimensions, and Nonstationarity

Abstract

Recently, there has been growing interest in developing statistical tools to conduct counterfactual analysis with aggregate data when a single “treated” unit suffers an intervention, such as a policy change, and there is no obvious control group. Usually, the proposed methods are based on the construction of an artificial counterfactual from a pool of “untre ated” peers, organized in a panel data structure. In this article, we consider a general framework for counterfactual analysis for high-dimensional, nonstationary data with either deterministic and/or stochastic trends, which nests well-established methods, such as the synthetic control. We propose a resampling procedure to test intervention effects that does not rely on postintervention asymptotics and that can be used even if there is only a single observation after the intervention. A simulation study is provided as well as an empirical application. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.