Advancing microdata models and methods

Showing 97 - 108 of 210 results

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Confi dence Intervals for Projections of Partially Identifi ed Parameters

Working Paper

We propose a bootstrap-based calibrated projection procedure to build confidence intervals for single components and for smooth functions of a partially identified parameter vector in moment (in)equality models. The method controls asymptotic coverage uniformly over a large class of data generating processes.

7 June 2019

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Econometrics with Partial Identification

Working Paper

Econometrics has traditionally revolved around point identi cation. Much effort has been devoted to finding the weakest set of assumptions that, together with the available data, deliver point identifi cation of population parameters, finite or infi nite dimensional that these might be. And point identifi cation has been viewed as a necessary prerequisite for meaningful statistical inference. The research program on partial identifi cation has begun to slowly shift this focus in the early 1990s, gaining momentum over time and developing into a widely researched area of econometrics.

31 May 2019

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Estimation Under Ambiguity

Working Paper

To perform Bayesian analysis of a partially identified structural model, two distinct approaches exist: standard Bayesian inference, which assumes a single prior for the structural parameters, including the non-identified ones; and multiple-prior Bayesian inference, which assumes full ambiguity for the non-identified parameters. The prior inputs considered by these two extreme approaches can often be a poor representation of the researcher’s prior knowledge in practice.

28 May 2019

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Non-asymptotic inference in a class of optimization problems

Working Paper

This paper describes a method for carrying out non-asymptotic inference on partially identifi ed parameters that are solutions to a class of optimization problems. The optimization problems arise in applications in which grouped data are used for estimation of a model's structural parameters. The parameters are characterized by restrictions that involve the population means of observed random variables in addition to the structural parameters of interest. Inference consists of finding con fidence intervals for the structural parameters. Our method is non-asymptotic in the sense that it provides a fi nite-sample bound on the difference between the true and nominal probabilities with which a confi dence interval contains the true but unknown value of a parameter. We contrast our method with an alternative non-asymptotic method based on the median-of-means estimator of Minsker (2015). The results of Monte Carlo experiments and an empirical example illustrate the usefulness of our method.

17 May 2019

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A Note on Specification Testing in Some Structural Regression Models

Working Paper

There exists a useful framework for jointly implementing Durbin-Wu-Hausman exogeneity and Sargan-Hansen overidenti cation tests, as a single arti cial regression. This note sets out the framework for linear models and discusses its extension to non-linear models. It also provides an empirical example and some Monte Carlo results.

16 May 2019

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Nonlinear factor models for network and panel data

Working Paper

Factor structures or interactive effects are convenient devices to incorporate latent variables in panel data models. We consider fixed effect estimation of nonlinear panel single-index models with factor structures in the unobservables, which include logit, probit, ordered probit and Poisson speci cations.

11 April 2019

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Posterior distribution of nondifferentiable functions

Working Paper

This paper examines the asymptotic behavior of the posterior distribution of a possibly nondifferentiable function g(θ), where θ is a finite-dimensional parameter of either a parametric or semiparametric model. The main assumption is that the distribution of a suitable estimator θ^n, its bootstrap approximation, and the Bayesian posterior for θ all agree asymptotically.

3 April 2019

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Minimalist G-modelling: A comment on Efron

Working Paper

Efron's elegant approach to g-modeling for empirical Bayes problems is contrasted with an implementation of the Kiefer-Wolfowitz nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator for mixture models for several examples. The latter approach has the advantage that it is free of tuning parameters and consequently provides a relatively simple complementary method.

3 April 2019