The econometrics arXiv, with citations

Every SVAR result is conditional on two choices: the restrictions that identify the shock and the variables on which they operate. The literature disciplines the first; the second is chosen by hand. We develop a Bayesian methodology that constructs information sets, uses an out-of-sample criterion, and retains the largest system it admits. Under recursive identification, output rises with housing production rather than household credit alone. For monetar…

I develop an estimation and inference framework for distribution regression in dyadic network settings with two-way fixed effects that vary across thresholds of the outcome. I show that identification of the structural parameters is achieved through binarization of the outcome at each threshold, and estimate the model by conditional maximum likelihood, which "differences out" the fixed effects and circumvents the incidental parameter problem. The estimat…

In saturated fixed-effects regressions, Gaussian inference depends not on total identifying variation but on its concentration, measured by the self-normalized leverage $λ_n$ of the residualized treatment. When finitely many score weights remain persistent, the $t$-statistic converges to a convolution of raw errors and a Gaussian component. At full concentration, its null distribution varies across symmetric error laws with equal variance, so no fixed cr…

We develop a hierarchical Bayesian panel quantile regression model in which unit-specific coefficient paths are smoothed across quantiles by Gaussian processes, while a common time effect absorbs aggregate shocks. Componentwise-monotone Bernstein polynomials, perturbed by unit-specific deviations, deliver soft noncrossing, and we provide identification conditions together with a bound on the crossing probability. Applying the model to 33 countries over 1…

Estimating the dynamic effects of economic shocks in short and very short samples is impeded by a lack of degrees of freedom. We offer a solution based on a Bayesian hierarchical framework for estimating local projection (LP) impulse response functions across a panel of related time series. The framework explicitly accommodates unbalanced panels in which some series are substantially shorter than others, allowing the short series to borrow information fr…

Formula One outcomes reflect the joint contributions of drivers and constructors, but these contributions are unobserved and vary over time. We propose a Bayesian state-space model that disentangles dynamic driver and constructor abilities using two observed outcomes: fastest qualifying lap times and race rankings. Both outcomes depend jointly on latent driver and constructor states that evolve at the Grand Prix level, while the race equation additionall…

Credit stress testing requires impulse responses of portfolio default probabilities, not only macro-financial drivers. We derive closed-form generalized impulse responses for the mean, quantiles (PD-at-Risk), and expected shortfall in a modular framework combining a Bayesian VAR, a Gaussian satellite, and the Merton-Vasicek model underlying Basel IRB regulation. Results extend to any probit-Gaussian mapping of a latent factor. Nonlinearity makes response…

Objectives: While causal analysis of travel behavior is an emerging field, estimating heterogeneity in mode choice through causal modeling remains unexplored. This study demonstrates the application of a novel causal method, causal forest, to quantify the heterogeneity in travel mode choice shifts caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: We applied causal forests, a non-parametric causal machine learning method, to 802,935 trip records from the 2017 and…

The set of $n\times n$ correlation matrices, known as the elliptope, has volume decaying at the super-exponential rate $\exp{-\tfrac14 n^2\log n}$. We characterize where this vanishing volume concentrates. A uniform draw is entrywise close to the identity yet globally far from it and nearly singular: its maximum absolute correlation is of order $\sqrt{\log n/n}$, its Frobenius distance is asymptotic to $\sqrt n$, its empirical spectral distribution conve…

This paper considers difference-in-differences identification strategies when the parallel trends assumption holds after conditioning on covariates that may themselves be affected by the treatment (often referred to as "bad controls"). We show that common approaches such as simply dropping bad controls are often ill-advised and develop two alternative approaches that allow bad controls to function as genuine controls despite being affected by treatment.…

Empirical work often removes fixed effects, latent factors, or high-dimensional controls before estimating structural relationships. These transformations reduce confounding but may also remove identifying variation. We study linear panel IV after one equation-compatible nuisance projection under two-way dependence. The projected Jacobian determines which structural directions remain visible; the projected-score law determines their precision; and, on Ga…

This paper develops an econometric framework for analysing smooth structural change in cointegrated systems following a known intervention time. We consider a vector error-correction model in which the cointegration rank and the pre-intervention cointegrating structure are identified from a stable pre-intervention subsample. After the intervention, both the adjustment coefficients and the cointegrating vectors are allowed to evolve smoothly as functions…

We develop a fully nonlinear structural vector autoregressive framework in which the contemporaneous structural mapping may be nonlinear and non-additive. Identification is achieved by exploiting variation in the conditional distributions of the mutually independent structural shocks induced by an observed exogenous variable. Specifically, a general contrastive learning framework that makes use of this variation together with the assumed exponential-fami…

Recursive nonlinear impulse responses require an estimated innovation law whenever the impact shock is normalized by innovation ranks and future innovations are integrated out. The closest semiparametric recursive construction in the literature estimates the relevant innovation quantile functions smoothly and discusses a direct empirical-residual implementation without developing its complete first-order inference theory. We tackle this gap in a finite-d…

Prediction-based methods, including Large Language Models (LLMs) and other machine learning techniques, are often used to construct measures of political phenomena that are difficult to quantify directly, such as policy positions in manifestos or emotions expressed on social media. In many applications, these prediction-generated measures are used as explanatory variables in regression models, even though they are measured with error. This leads to biase…

We present a simple Gaussian approximation to the finite-sample distribution of the classical ridge regression estimator. Our approximation captures the fact that, in finite samples, the ridge regression estimator trades off bias and variance to reduce estimation and prediction error. Our approximation is based on nonstandard asymptotics where $i)$ we let the estimator's regularization parameter grow proportionally to the sample size; and $ii)$ we treat…

Agentic AI is gaining acceptance in asset management, but governance has not kept pace: 88% of surveyed finance professionals report no operational governance framework for agentic AI despite universal awareness of its deployment, and only 24 of 75 large U.S. money managers disclosing AI use in Form ADV filings report a formal governance policy. We argue this gap is architectural, not cultural: governance built for deterministic systems assumes static va…

Modern economic panel data sets are often high-dimensional: they contain information on a wide variety of control variables whose number may even exceed the sample size. Nevertheless, the literature on econometric methods for high-dimensional panels is quite limited. In this paper, we study high-dimensional panel models with interactive fixed effects where the regression function has an additive structure, i.e., each covariate enters the model via an unk…

The CLIP Q-score is a novel, safe, fully reproducible, and computationally efficient method for extracting objective product quality metrics from visual data using contrastive language-image pre-training. We introduce the technique and provide an extensive application to real estate data from an online platform ($\sim500,000$ images). Our open-source metric aligns with LLM assessments and proves to be a powerful predictor of housing market prices for bot…

A novel method to estimate social effect coefficients in the popular so-called linear-in-means regression model in the Social Sciences is presented here that utilizes non-experimental multidimensional network data. The procedure can accommodate social interactions that correlate with the error in the model by making use of a different set of network links among the same observations that are exogenous in the traditional sense. In particular, the full obs…

This paper proposes a model-based empirical method to identify influential individuals in risky behaviors. To determine the most influential individuals, we estimate peer influence using observational cross-sectional data from multiple social connections. Our empirical strategy employs the observed characteristics of distant individuals across multiple social networks as instruments to address the endogeneity arising from homophily. Using Add Health data…

This paper introduces an innovative approach to identifying and estimating the parameters of interest in the widely recognized linear-in-means regression model under conditions where the initial randomization of peers determines the observed network. We assert that peers who are initially randomized do not produce social effects. However, after randomization, agents can endogenously develop significant connections that potentially generate peer influence…

Factor structures are central to empirical work in economics and finance, and are usually used to model time-varying unobserved heterogeneity through interactive fixed effects (IFE). Existing IFE estimators rest on low-dimensional and linear specifications in the covariates, assumptions which are increasingly restrictive in applications drawing on rich datasets with controls of unknown functional form. This paper develops a Double Machine Learning estima…

Monotone treatment response (MTR), monotone treatment selection (MTS), and monotone instrumental variable (MIV) assumptions are widely used to partially identify counterfactual mean outcomes, but existing analyses have focused almost exclusively on scalar outcomes. We develop a unified framework for partial identification with outcomes that take values in a general metric space under these monotonicity restrictions by embedding the metric space into an $…

In many practical applications, only noisy proxies for the true regressors are available, which is commonly believed to induce an attenuation bias. In the linear-in-means model, however, estimated peer effects might be inflated, potentially leading to false positives. This paper shows that the asymptotic bias depends on the interplay between individual characteristics and network links and demonstrates how the network structure can facilitate identificat…

Understanding how macroeconomic shocks propagate across countries requires structural models that can jointly identify country-specific shocks and their international transmission. Yet extending structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) to large multi-country systems is challenging due to rapidly increasing dimensionality, computational costs, and the proliferation of identifying restrictions. This paper develops a Bayesian Structural Matrix Autoregressi…

Because 2SLS is built from sample averages, a small number of observations can have a disproportionate effect on estimates and inference. We introduce W-2SLS, a simple drop-in robustification that replaces these averages by quantile-winsorized means. We analyze W-2SLS under adversarial contamination, which permits both the identities and the reported values of the contaminated observations to depend on the realized clean sample and therefore accommodates…

A defining problem of the Anthropocene is to model the physical Earth and human societies as one coupled system, yet no learned representation spans their observational breadth. We argue the obstacle is geometric: the physical Earth is measured as continuous fields that ignore political borders, whereas societies are reported for administrative units. Earth-system foundation models serve the first geometry; coupling it to the second has required lossy av…

Cross-unit dependence is pervasive in empirical applications and complicates econometric inference, especially when spillovers operate in nonlinear ways. We propose a novel nonparametric test for cross-unit spillovers that may operate through peers' attributes, peers' outcomes, or both. The test is straightforward to implement, as it requires only estimation under the null hypothesis of no cross-unit spillovers, and is shown to have a convenient asymptot…

Recently, it has been proposed to model the microstructure noise in prices by a continuous-time process with continuous sample paths that are rougher than those of a standard Brownian motion. In this paper, we propose a microstructural model for the tick-by-tick price changes that explicitly separates the permanent price changes from the fleeting price changes due to noise. We show how this model converges to a standard semimartingale model for the perma…

Applied research in economics is intrinsically motivated by broad normative objectives. However, it is not obvious how a researcher should direct their efforts to produce evidence toward such objectives. This paper reviews recent theoretical developments on research design for policy choice and provides new tools applied researchers can use to guide their design choices and communicate their policy recommendations. First, I focus on theoretical contribut…

We develop fast methods for conditional forecasting and structural scenario analysis with high-dimensional Bayesian vector autoregressions (VARs). Our general framework features a factor structure on the reduced-form errors, which enables fast and order-invariant equation-by-equation estimation; suitably identified factors admit a structural interpretation. The scenarios are defined through separate distributional restrictions on observables, structural…

Testing independence or conditional independence is fundamental to statistical inference, yet existing methods for non-Euclidean random objects often face a difficult trade-off between geometric flexibility and theoretical tractability. We introduce the Distance Profile Embedding (DPE), a novel representation that maps random objects from general metric spaces into a Hilbert space of square-integrable functions. We prove that this mapping is injective an…

This paper develops bootstrap inference for autoregressive conditional duration (ACD) models observed over a fixed calendar span, so that the number of durations is random. We study recursive schemes that either fix the calendar span or the realized event count. For the fixed-count bootstrap, we establish consistency when the duration tail index satisfies $κ\geq1$. When $0<κ<1$, classical consistency fails because the estimator has a mixed-normal limit,…

This paper develops linear estimators for structural and causal parameters of nonseparable models using panel data. These models incorporate unobserved, time-varying, individual heterogeneity, which may be correlated with the regressors. Estimation is based on an approximation of a conditional average potential outcome by a linear sieve specification with individual-specific parameters. Effects of interest are estimated by a bias corrected average of ind…

This paper studies the presence of noncausal dynamics in standard macro-finance VAR models and asks whether they reflect genuine nonfundamentalness or omitted information available to economic agents but unobserved by the econometrician. To that end, we introduce a factor-filtering mixed causal-noncausal VARX approach designed to account for common macroeconomic information. We assess its performance in simulated settings, while showing also that the gen…

We develop a finite-sample valid inference procedure for strategic network formation models in which linking decisions depend on endogenous network statistics (say, the number of common friends). Only a single network is required to be observed, and we restrict neither its density, nor the dependence structure induced by strategic interaction, nor the equilibrium selection mechanism. We exploit a bounding-by-c technique to construct a set of sandwich ine…

Design/methodology/approach A time-varying parameter vector autoregression (TVP-VAR) model is employed to quantify dynamic connectedness and directional volatility spillovers using daily data from May 1, 2013, to May 2, 2023. The study isolates the impact of extreme events by splitting the data into pre- and post-COVID-19 samples based on the February 2020 stock market crash. Purpose This paper examines the daily financial risk spillovers associated with…

A common concern in empirical modelling centres around whether estimated regression coefficients are affected by a small set of outlying observations. To conduct outlier robustness checks in practical applications of instrumental variables regressions, the common practice is to run ordinary two stage least squares (2SLS) and remove observations with standardised residuals beyond a chosen cut-off value. Subsequently, the trimmed 2SLS is computed and compa…

This paper develops omnibus specification tests for linear conditional-mean models with undirected dyadic data. We establish a uniform projection theorem that reduces the dyadic process to its latent first-order node projections under shared-node dependence. We then show that a raw first-order node-multiplier bootstrap is valid when this node component is nondegenerate but double-counts dyad-specific variation when dyads are independent. An exact covaria…