Question on Synthetic control method placebo test

[Yehia Amin]

Hello Everyone!

I'm running the synthetic control method on stata 13 and am trying to do the placebo tests based on Abadie et al "Synthetic Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies: Estimating the Effect of California’s Tobacco Control Program"

I'm running the following code:
. forval i=1/57{qui synth gdpgrowth gdp domcredit grosscapform fdigdp govcons tradeopen, trunit('i') trperiod (2009) keep(synth_'i
> ', replace) }

but I keep getting the following error: program error: code follows on the same line as open brace

Can anyone help me out please?
Thank you.
Yehia

[Belinda Foster]

Stata already told you what is wrong:

forval i=1/57 {
     qui synth ...
}

Braces should be placed on separate lines.

[Yehia Amin]

Thanks so much.

Now I'm getting the error:

treated unit not found in panelvar - check tr()
r(198);

after having inserted the above command on separate lines.
Any ideas what that means?

Thanks again!

[Ariel Karlinsky]

the local i should not be enclosed in regular single quote marks like you did 'i' but rather with a single quote mark on the right side and a "grave mark" (you can look it up) on the left side as such:
`i'

[Yehia Amin]

Dear Ariel,

I have done that and I keep getting the same error.

This is the code I'm using:

forval i=1/57{
qui synth gdpgrowth gdp domcredit grosscapform fdigdp govcons tradeopen, trunit(`i') trperiod(2009) keep(synth_`i', replace)
}

Can you see where the problem is?

[Ariel Karlinsky]

did you tsset the data?

[Yehia Amin]

Yes, I did

[Ariel Karlinsky]

This is very strange. unfortunately, this thread is the first time I have encountered the synth command and I tried to help by working with it's help file and examples and general stata knowledge... I regret to say that this is far as I can go, unless you can upload your data or a part of it via dataex (see the FAQ).