Synthetic Control Replication

In a pair, we replicated Chrisinger (2021)‘s paper “Philadelphia’s Excise Tax on Sugar-Sweetened and Artificially Sweetened Beverages and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Benefit Redemption ↗” in R. While we were able to replicate similar trends, the magnitude of the effects differs and our models lack robustness. We attribute these disparities to our lack of access to final data used and variations in synthetic control implementations. Until these discrepancies are addressed, we withhold definitive conclusions regarding the claimed impact of the introduced excise tax in Philadelphia County and its neighboring counties.