Pakistan synthetic control estimate of the day

I find that Pakistan’s per capita GDP would have been an average of about $718 per year higher had the country not undertaken the effort to produce a nuclear weapon. This equates to per capita GDP being 27.8 percent lower on average over the 25-year weapons-development period. Results are robust to several alternative specifications, including country exclusion, sparse synthetic controls, non-outcome characteristics as predictors of GDP, and in-space placebo experiments of differing specifications.

Here is the paper by Anthony Mayberry, via TEKL.