We analyze the properties of the Synthetic Control (SC) and related estimators when the pre‐treatment fit is imperfect. In this framework, we show that these estimators are generally biased if treatment assignment is correlated with unobserved confounders, even when the number of...

This paper aims to shed additional light on the existence of opportunistic and partisan political-business cycles in the Brazilian economy over the 1996-2016 period. To that end, it relies on two different approaches: (I) an Oaxaca model in the spirit of Blinder and Watson (2016); and (II) a...