SynthDiD 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Synthetic Difference-in-Differences

On the method’s advantages and disadvantages, demonstrated with the synthdid package in R

In this blog post, I give a quick introduction to the Synthetic Difference-in-Differences (SynthDiD) method and discuss its relation to the traditional Difference-in-Differences (DiD) and Synthetic Control Method (SCM). SynthDiD is a generalized version of SCM and DiD that combines the strengths of both methods. It enables causal inference with large panels, even with a short pretreatment period. I discuss …

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