Assessing Balance for Matching and RCTs

Assessing the balance between treatment and control groups across control variables is an important part of propensity score matching. It's heuristically an attempt to ‘recreate’ a situation similar to a randomized experiment where all subjects are essentially the same except for the treatment (Thoemmes and Kim, 2011). Matching itself should not be viewed so much as an estimation technique, but a pre-processing step to ensure that members assigned to treatment and control groups have similar cov