disco: Distributional Synthetic Controls

The method of synthetic controls is widely used for evaluating causal effects of policy changes in settings with observational data. Often, researchers aim to estimate the causal impact of policy interventions on a treated unit at an aggregate level while also possessing data at a finer granularity. In this article, we introduce the new disco command, which implements the Distributional Synthetic Controls method introduced in Gunsilius (2023). This command allows researchers to construct entire synthetic distributions for the treated unit based on an optimally weighted average of the distributions of the control units. Several aggregation schemes are provided to facilitate clear reporting of the distributional effects of the treatment. The package offers both quantile-based and CDF-based approaches, comprehensive inference procedures via bootstrap and permutation methods, and visualization capabilities. We empirically illustrate the use of the package by replicating the results in Van Dijcke et al. (2024).

Free Discontinuity Design: With an Application to the Economic Effects of Internet Shutdowns

Thresholds in treatment assignments can produce discontinuities in outcomes, revealing causal insights. In many contexts, like geographic settings, these thresholds are unknown and multivariate. We propose a non-parametric method to estimate the resulting discontinuities by segmenting the regression surface into smooth and discontinuous parts. This estimator uses a convex relaxation of the Mumford-Shah functional, for which we establish identification and convergence. Using our method, we estimate that an internet shutdown in India resulted in a reduction of economic activity by over 50%, greatly surpassing previous estimates and shedding new light on the true cost of such shutdowns for digital economies globally.