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This tutorial presents the analysis of the 5th chapter of my master thesis - "The Effect of Conditional Cash Transfer Policies on Crime: Evidence from a Synthetic Controls Framework" - Felipe Santos-Marquez

quarcs-lab/Tutorial-synthetic-control-methods-Felipe-thesis-chapter5

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Suggested citation: Felipe Santos-Marquez. (2021, March 9). quarcs-lab/Tutorial-synthetic-control-methods-Felipe-thesis-chapter5: v1.0.2 zenodo (Version v1.0.2). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4590069

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

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This repository contains a tutorial to replicate the results of the 5th chapter of my Master Thesis.

The Effect of Conditional Cash Transfer Policies on Crime: Evidence from a Synthetic Controls Framework

In the academic literature, there is not a broad agreement on the relationship between violent crime and the expansion of conditional cash transfer programs. This chapter sheds some light onto the impact that the largest of these type of programs has on homicide rates in Colombian municipalities. The causality link is exposed using synthetic control methods. This study is focalised in one of the most violent regions in the country, the Pacific region. The results suggest that when accounting for variance instability, the homicide rates in treated regions are lower than their synthetic control counterparts. Also, placebo studies are performed to evaluate the significance of the results. On average, the effects of the conditional cash transfer program on homicide rates are reported to be significant at a 5% level. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future research that can be conducted on the impact of social welfare on other types of crimes, and another robustness checks that can be performed to test the findings of this chapter.

Online Environments

  • This notebook can also be executed online at GESIS Notebooks. Just copy the URL of this repository and paste it on the BINDER form To open a virtual R Studio session, make sure you change you click on File and change it to URL. Then, write rstudio in the field URL to open (optional). Finally, click on launch.

Major References

  • Abadie, Alberto, Alexis Diamond, and Jens Hainmueller (2010). "Synthetic control methods for comparative case studies: Estimating the effect of California's tobacco control program". In: Journal of the American statistical Association 105.490, pp. 493-505.

  • Abadie, Alberto, Alexis Diamond, and Jens Hainmueller (2011). "Synth: An r package for synthetic control methods in comparative case studies". In: Journal of Statistical Software 42.13.

  • Abadie, Alberto, Alexis Diamond, and Jens Hainmueller (2015). "Comparative politics and the synthetic control method". In: American Journal of Political Science 59.2, pp. 495-510.

  • Abadie, Alberto and Javier Gardeazabal (2003). "The economic costs of conflict: A case study of the Basque Country". In: American economic review 93.1, pp. 113-132.

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This tutorial presents the analysis of the 5th chapter of my master thesis - "The Effect of Conditional Cash Transfer Policies on Crime: Evidence from a Synthetic Controls Framework" - Felipe Santos-Marquez

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