ArCo: An R package to Estimate Artificial Counterfactuals

Abstract

In this paper we introduce the ArCo package for R which consists of a set of functions to implement the the Artificial Counterfactual (ArCo) methodology to estimate causal effects of an intervention (treatment) on aggregated data and when a control group is not necessarily available. The ArCo method is a two-step procedure, where in the first stage a counterfactual is estimated from a large panel of time series from a pool of untreated peers. In the second-stage, the average treatment effect over the post-intervention sample is computed. Standard inferential procedures are available. The package is illustrated with both simulated and real datasets.