[hodder]

Entropy balancing cannot fix unobserved confounders.

"Teasing out causation" is exactly why this methodology fails. You are confusing the intended purpose of a statistical tool with its real-world validity. No one is questioning what an Entropy-Balanced Poisson Regression or a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences model is designed to do.

The issue is that the authors have profoundly violated the mathematical assumptions required for these tools to actually function. Throwing high-level econometric terms into an abstract does not make the underlying logic scientific, but rather acts as a linguistic tuxedo on a fundamentally broken causal claim.

If you cannot see through economic (and other) confounders that invalidate their approach and their biased statements, I cannot help you. This isn't science. Getting an LLM to run an SDID model and spit out a result doesn't = science.