Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: May, 2015, Volume 83, Issue 3

Sieve Wald and QLR Inferences on Semi/Nonparametric Conditional Moment Models

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA10771
p. 1013-1079

X. Chen and D. Pouzo

This paper considers inference on functionals of semi/nonparametric conditional moment restrictions with possibly nonsmooth generalized residuals, which include all of the (nonlinear) nonparametric instrumental variables (IV) as special cases. These models are often ill‐posed and hence it is difficult to verify whether a (possibly nonlinear) functional is root‐ estimable or not. We provide computationally simple, unified inference procedures that are asymptotically valid regardless of whether a functional is root‐ estimable or not. We establish the following new useful results: (1) the asymptotic normality of a plug‐in penalized sieve minimum distance (PSMD) estimator of a (possibly nonlinear) functional; (2) the consistency of simple sieve variance estimators for the plug‐in PSMD estimator, and hence the asymptotic chi‐square distribution of the sieve Wald statistic; (3) the asymptotic chi‐square distribution of an optimally weighted sieve quasi likelihood ratio (QLR) test under the null hypothesis; (4) the asymptotic tight distribution of a non‐optimally weighted sieve QLR statistic under the null; (5) the consistency of generalized residual bootstrap sieve Wald and QLR tests; (6) local power properties of sieve Wald and QLR tests and of their bootstrap versions; (7) asymptotic properties of sieve Wald and SQLR for functionals of increasing dimension. Simulation studies and an empirical illustration of a nonparametric quantile IV regression are presented.


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Supplemental Material

Supplement to "Sieve Wald and QLR Inferences on Semi/Nonparametric Conditional Moment Models"

This zip file contains the replication files for the manuscript.

Supplement to "Sieve Wald and QLR Inferences on Semi/Nonparametric Conditional Moment Models"

This appendix provides the proofs of all the lemmas, theorems and propositions stated in the main text.  Additional results on consistent sieve variance estimators and bootstrap sieve t statistics are also presented.