Synthetic Control

This study asks whether strict voter identification (ID) laws affect voter turnout in the United States and whether effects differ by election type and by when states adopted these laws. Using state-level turnout from 1984–2020 and a synthetic difference-in-differences approach to address time-varying confounders and improve power, the paper compares aggregate and disaggregated effects across presidential versus midterm elections and between early- and late-adopting states. The central contribution is evidence that aggregate effects are close to zero but that heterogeneous, modest impacts appear in some contexts and may help reconcile mixed prior findings.

Does government treatment of religion affect intergroup religious violence in Western democracies? This study asks whether government-based religious discrimination against minorities and government support for majority religion influence religiously motivated societal violence involving Muslim minorities.

This article analyzes a unique policy change in Nebraska in 1937, its switch from a bicameral to a unicameral legislature. Using the synthetic control method (SCM), which creates an artificial counterfactual state by combining other states as controls, I estimate the impact of this change on government expenditures.