"Short and simple confidence intervals when the directions of some effects are known" (with Adam McCloskey)
Accepted at Review of Economics and Statistics
[abstract|paper|Matlab
code]
Stata code available from SSC archive: type "ssc install ssci"
We introduce adaptive confidence intervals on a parameter of interest in the presence of nuisance parameters, such as coefficients on control variables, with known signs. Our confidence intervals are trivial to compute and can provide significant length reductions relative to standard ones when the nuisance parameters are small. At the same time, they entail minimal length increases at any parameter values. We apply our confidence intervals to the linear regression model, prove their uniform validity and illustrate their length properties in an empirical application to a factorial design field experiment and a Monte Carlo study calibrated to the empirical application.
"Testing overidentifying restrictions with a restricted parameter space" Economics Letters, December 2019, 185, 108743
[abstract|paper|supplementary material]
We show that the standard test for testing overidentifying restrictions, which compares
the J-statistic (Hansen, 1982) to χ2 critical values, does not control asymptotic size
when the true parameter vector is allowed to lie on the boundary of the (optimization)
parameter space. We also propose a modified J-statistic that, under the null hypothesis,
is asymptotically χ2 distributed, such that the resulting test does control asymptotic size.
"On asymptotic size distortions in the random
coefficients logit model" Journal of Econometrics, October 2019, 212(2), pp. 413-432
[abstract|paper]
We show that, in the random coefficients logit model, standard
inference procedures can suffer from asymptotic size distortions. The
problem arises due to boundary issues and is aggravated by the standard
parameterization of the model, in terms of standard deviations. For
example, in case of a single random coefficient, the asymptotic size of
the nominal 95% confidence interval obtained by inverting the two-sided
t-test for the standard deviation equals 83.65%. In seeming
contradiction, we also show that standard error estimates for the
estimator of the standard deviation can be unreasonably large. This
problem is alleviated if the model is reparameterized in terms of
variances. Furthermore, a numerical evaluation of a conjectured lower
bound suggests that the asymptotic size of the nominal 95% confidence
interval obtained by inverting the two-sided t-test for variances
(means) is within 0.5 percentage points of the nominal level as long as
there are no more than five (four) random coefficients and as long as
an optimal weighting matrix is employed.
"Subvector inference when the true parameter vector may be near or at the boundary" Journal of Econometrics, December 2018, 207(2), pp. 285-306
[abstract|paper|supplementary material]
Extremum estimators are not
asymptotically normally distributed when the estimator satisfies the
restrictions on the parameter space—such as the
non-negativity of a variance parameter—and the true parameter
vector is near or at the boundary. This possible
lack of asymptotic normality makes it difficult to construct tests for
testing subvector hypotheses that control asymptotic size in a uniform
sense and have good local asymptotic power irrespective of whether the
true parameter vector is at, near, or far from the boundary. We propose
a novel estimator that is asymptotically normally distributed even when
the true parameter vector is near or at the boundary and the objective
function is not defined outside the parameter space. The proposed
estimator allows the implementation of a new test based on the
Conditional Likelihood Ratio statistic that is easy-to-implement,
controls asymptotic size, and has good local asymptotic power
properties. Furthermore, we show that the test enjoys certain
asymptotic optimality properties when the parameter of interest is
scalar. In an application of the random coefficients logit model
(Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes, 1995) to the European car market, we find
that, for most parameters, the new test leads to tighter confidence
intervals than the two-sided t-test commonly used in practice.
Working papers
Allowing for weak identification when testing GARCH-X type models
[abstract|paper]
In this paper, we use the results in Andrews and Cheng (2012), extended to allow for parameters to be near or at the boundary of the parameter space, to derive the asymptotic distributions of the two test statistics that are used in the two-step (testing) procedure proposed by Pedersen and Rahbek (2019). The latter aims at testing the null hypothesis that a GARCH-X type model, with exogenous covariates (X), reduces to a standard GARCH type model, while allowing the "GARCH parameter" to be unidentified. We then provide a characterization result for the asymptotic size of any test for testing this null hypothesis before numerically establishing a lower bound on the asymptotic size of the two-step procedure at the 5% nominal level. This lower bound exceeds the nominal level, revealing that the two-step procedure does not control asymptotic size. In a simulation study, we show that this finding is relevant for finite samples, in that the two-step procedure can suffer from overrejection in finite samples. We also propose a new test that, by construction, controls asymptotic size and is found to be more powerful than the two-step procedure when the "ARCH parameter" is "very small" (in which case the two-step procedure underrejects).
Measuring sex-selective abortion: How many women abort? (with Aditi Dimri and Véronique Gille)
[abstract|paper]
Current measurement of sex-selective abortion is based on a comparison of the sex ratio at birth with the natural sex ratio and provides us with the number of aborted female foetuses. This, however, does not tell us how prevalent the phenomenon is, i.e., how many women abort, which will differ from the number of aborted female foetuses when there is repeated sex-selective abortion. In this paper, we show that the number of women that abort between two consecutive births can be inferred using the sex ratio at birth and information on birth spacing. We use this result to study sex-selective abortion patterns in India over time and across birth orders, sibling compositions, and different socio-demographic/geographic groups. We find evidence of strong heterogeneity across samples, with the number of aborted female foetuses being up to 50% larger than the number of women that abort. Our findings suggest possible improvements in targeting of policies that aim at reducing sex-selective abortion.
Code for the Random
Coefficients Logit Model
This
Matlab
code estimates the Random
Coefficients Logit Model with respect to variances rather than standard
deviations, as suggested in "On asymptotic size distortions in the random coefficients logit model."
It also implements the
estimator proposed in "Subvector inference when the true parameter vector may be near or at the boundary" and the
modified J-statistic proposed in "Testing overidentifying restrictions with a restricted parameter space."
It is a modified version of the
code that can be found on Professor Dubé's website
and uses the MPEC formulation of the estimation problem.