A Synthetic Business Cycle Approach to Counterfactual Analysis with Nonstationary Macroeconomic Data
非平稳宏观数据反事实分析的合成经济周期方法
This paper investigates the use of synthetic control methods for causal inference in macroeconomic settings when dealing with possibly nonstationary data. While the synthetic control approach has gained popularity for estimating counterfactual outcomes, we caution researchers against assuming a common nonstationary trend factor across units for macroeconomic outcomes, as doing so may result in misleading causal estimation-a pitfall we refer to as the spurious synthetic…