Introduction What if the federal minimum wage is raised to 16 dollars an hour? What if Steve Smith bats at number 5 in the Ashes 2019 instead of number 3? What if Australian style gun laws were implemented in the USA - what would be the impact on gun related violence? What if Eden Hazard attacks today instead of winging in the midfield? "What if?” is one of the favorite questions that occupy minds, from sports fans to policymakers to philosophers. Invariably, there is no one answer to the What ifs and everyone remains convinced in their own alternate realities but a new wave of work has been looking at data-driven approaches to answer (at least a subset of) these What If questions. The mathematical tool of (Robust) Synthetic Control examines these What If questions by creating a synthetic version of reality and explore its evolution in time as a counterfactual to the actual reality. Recently, together with my collaborators Jehangir Amjad (MIT/Google) Devavra
A place where I talk about some of my academic research.