Albalate, Daniel, 1980-Bel i Queralt, Germà, 1963-Mazaira-Font, Ferran2020-05-052020-05-052020https://hdl.handle.net/2445/158714The synthetic control method (SCM) has been increasingly adopted to evaluate causal effects under quasi-experimental designs. However, SCM suffers from sound weaknesses that compromise its accuracy, stability and meaningfulness. The Regularized SHAP-distance synthetic control method (RSD-SCM) is proposed as solution. We evaluate the economic effect of the government formation deadlock in Spain, 2016. The deadlock did not negatively affect economic growth, as the economy grew 1.58% more without full government; standard SCM method overestimates the effect by 0.23 pp. We show that RSD-SCM offers higher accuracy and stability, while ensuring the economic meaningfulness of covariates used in building the counterfactual.39 p.application/pdfengcc-by-nc-nd, (c) Albalate et al., 2020http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/Models economètricsControl de gestióCausalitatEconometric modelsManagement auditCausationinfo:eu-repo/semantics/workingPaperinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess