The econometrics arXiv, with citations

Many scientific phenomena are best understood as outcomes of underlying optimization problems, yet automated scientific discovery has largely focused on recovering equations that describe observed input-output patterns. We introduce OptScientist, a novel automated framework for discovering compact symbolic optimization laws directly from data. OptScientist comprises (i) a model that infers symbolic optimization problems by first learning to represent dat…

This paper establishes the existence and essential uniqueness of an intuitively refined Markov-perfect equilibrium in a duopoly game with sunk costs, barriers to entry, firm-specific technological progress, and irreversible exit. We develop an algorithm that quickly computes the equilibrium by solving for fixed points of a finite sequence of auxiliary contraction mappings, which we label Fake Backward Induction. We illustrate the game's practical value w…

We compare the relation between sentiment noise in the Twitter feed and losses for stocks of domestic and foreign firms. The mean quarterly domestic-foreign difference in the slope of next-quarter losses on measured noise is -1.40 (Newey-West t = -2.99). This slope is negative for 78 and 48 percent of the quarters for domestic and foreign stocks, respectively (block-bootstrap p = 0.016). Thus, this relationship is temporally more stable for domestic stoc…

In this paper, we propose a simple score-based specification test for the Tobit regression model, implemented through a computationally efficient multiplier bootstrap. We test correct specification through the conditional moment restriction that the generalized Tobit residual has zero conditional mean, and construct a feasible score-based empirical process using the integrated conditional moments approach, conditioning on the estimated index so that no s…

We develop an arithmetic multi-factor stochastic volatility model for commodity futures and options. The arithmetic specification yields a low-dimensional Markovian representation of the futures curve and semi-closed-form pricing formulas for vanilla and basket options, including calendar spread options. These properties make the model suitable for large-scale empirical estimation. We estimate the model using an unscented Kalman filter on a panel of WTI…

We establish central limit theorems for empirical plug-in estimators of scalar functionals of quadratic optimal transport maps and potentials, including Wasserstein costs and several risk measures constructed from transport-based multivariate quantiles. We study the one-sample problem with a known reference distribution and i.i.d. observations from the target distribution. A natural approach is to combine a limit theorem for the empirical transport map w…

This paper studies data-driven macroeconomic policy choice in a structural VAR framework. We formulate the policymaker's problem of optimizing the future path of a policy instrument as a statistical decision problem under two alternative policy regimes: a "contemporaneous" regime, where the chosen path is implemented through unexpected policy shocks each period, and a "forward guidance" regime, where the expected path is announced in advance and enforced…

This paper studies social interactions in discrete choice models in which individuals can respond differently to different network members, conforming to some while distinguishing from others. In this generalized framework, I show how to use within-network variation in individual choices to draw inference about differences in endogenous interaction effects, while accounting for unobserved contextual effects. I also show how to construct internal instrume…

This paper investigates the ability of random feature models to learn more complex patterns than the simple negative autocorrelation of financial returns. Theoretical insights highlight that the learning capacity of random features ridge regression is determined by the interplay between signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) level and regularization. We characterize the different learning regimes through the derivation of a particular threshold: the SNR frontier. P…

Researchers often observe group quantiles but not group means, raising the question of whether these summaries alone support conventional regression analysis. We develop estimation and inference methods for linear models of group means under quantile-only and mixed disclosure. We establish conditions on disclosure design for consistent estimation and asymptotic normality at the parametric rate. Under fixed disclosure, we characterize sharp identified set…

The synthetic control method matches a treated unit to a convex combination of donor units, with the relative importance of each predictor determined by a weight matrix $V$. In standard practice, $V$ is selected through a bi-level optimization problem that is nonconvex and lacks convergence guarantees. This article derives an exact geometric solution for synthetic control estimators. For any positive definite $V$, a synthetic control is given by the proj…

Panel local projections are widely used to estimate impulse responses in policy analysis. This paper examines the properties of the fixed-effect estimator and various bias-correction methods in panel local projections, focusing on settings with autoregressive control variables. We analyze the bias and variance of these estimators while allowing for persistence in both the target and control variables. Our theoretical findings indicate that the half-panel…

Most empirical models of trend inflation treat it as a latent random walk driven by unobserved shocks, so they cannot say which economic conditions move it. Deep-$π^*$ makes the innovations to the trend a possibly nonlinear function of a large number of macroeconomic indicators, estimated with neural networks, so that Shapley values can be used to attribute every movement of the trend to the indicators behind it. Two complementary loss functions define a…

This paper develops tuning-free tests for treatment-effect heterogeneity. By characterizing the null hypothesis as constancy of the expectile treatment-effect curve, we construct test statistics as continuous functionals of the mean-centered sample expectile process. We establish a uniform Bahadur representation, derive the asymptotic properties of the test statistics under the null and fixed alternatives, and show nontrivial power against local alternat…

We study the design of multi-arm experiments that identify local average treatment effects under imperfect compliance. With three or more arms, conventional randomization fails to identify margin-specific effects even under strong extensions of monotone compliance. A choice-theoretic analysis unifies these extensions and motivates a two-stage design: subjects report a preferred arm and are randomized conditional on it. If treatment is confined to the ass…

We study inference on common slope parameters in linear panel models with two-way unobserved heterogeneity. In linear regression, bias arises from unobserved heterogeneity that is shared between the residual and the covariates. Our common unobserved heterogeneity (CUH) estimator targets this common variation directly: it searches over functionals of the residualised outcome for variation that also resides in the covariates, and seeks to further project o…

Modeling limit order book (LOB) dynamics is central to market forecasting and execution-strategy evaluation. While diffusion models achieve strong empirical performance, existing LOB snapshot models typically lack a learned recurrent encoder and formal statistical guarantees. We introduce LOBGrad, a conditional DDPM framework for probabilistic LOB forecasting that combines an autoregressive RNN encoder with a diffusion-based generator. In particular, we…

This paper studies inference on the value of a linear program (LP) when the objective and constraints are estimated. Using LP duality, we construct one- and two-sided confidence intervals by inverting tests of the feasibility of systems of linear inequalities. Existing tests yield asymptotically valid confidence intervals but can have poor power. We propose a modification that augments these systems with estimated “box constraints.” The resulting procedu…

Measures of functional dependence that characterize both independence and perfect dependence have attracted growing interest. Despite their appealing theoretical properties, existing rank- and graph-based estimators can suffer from substantial bias under general dependence, limiting their usefulness for statistical inference. Moreover, a systematic and practically accessible framework for mitigating such bias while achieving semiparametric efficiency rem…

VAR-LiNGAM recovers a contemporaneous structure from reduced-form innovations under mutual independence of the underlying structural shocks. Recovery itself and bootstrap stability of the recovered edges are natural post-estimation outputs, but neither directly assesses the identifying independence assumption. We organize post-recovery validation as an ordered, non-compensatory protocol with four layers (reduced-form admissibility, distributional informa…

Existing regression inference methods for nonstationary heavy tailed data are largely limited to unit roots tests. Functional central limit theorems (FCLTs), which are commonly used for the asymptotic analysis of nonstationary models, are inapplicable to nonstationary data characterized by a memory parameter $d<1$ and a stability parameter $α<2$. Furthermore, it is well known that inference under nonstationarity is often non-conventional, and this issue…

Nested logit is widely used in operational demand models, yet jointly estimating its utility coefficients and nest dissimilarity parameters requires nonconvex optimization. Standard estimation routines offer no certificate of global optimality, leaving a gap between globally optimizing decisions under nested-logit demand and reliably estimating that demand model. We develop, to our knowledge, the first globally convergent optimization framework with an e…

This paper considers nonparametric quantile regression for directed dyadic data observed on the ordered pairs of a complete network with n vertices. The observations exhibit dyadic dependence: dyads with disjoint indices are independent, whereas dyads sharing one or two indices are correlated. The local linear smoothing technique is adopted to estimate the quantile regression function. The asymptotic theory reveals that convergence rates of the proposed…

Synthetic control methods estimate counterfactual outcomes by weighting untreated donor units to match a treated unit before treatment. In recent applications, however, the donor pool can be large, highly correlated, and short in pre-treatment history, yielding many near-equivalent solutions with unstable and difficult-to-interpret donor weights. We propose Graph-Regularized Synthetic Control (Graph-SC), a convex estimator that augments the classical pre…

We propose an online multivariate distributional forecasting model in which we condition the parameters of a vine copula on covariates. An online algorithm updates the parameters sequentially using only the most recent observations. Existing approaches require full batch re-estimation using all available data at each update step, which makes them computationally slow in large-scale forecasting applications and less suitable for settings in which dependen…

Automated markets increasingly host autonomous, learning trading agents and are powered by formulaic automated market makers (AMMs). We study how heterogeneous agent behavior shapes stress, risk-adjusted performance, liquidity, and volatility in these types of markets. Three behavioral archetypes are modeled as agentic reinforcement learning (RL) systems: a rational arbitrageur, a manipulator, and a retail herd-follower. Each archetype is defined by its…

Many parameters of interest in economics depend on outcomes generated by machine learning (ML).These generated outcomes are subsequently used in standard econometric estimation and typically treated as observed, a practice that threatens the validity of downstream inference. Empirically relevant cases include dynamic treatment effects under sequential exogeneity, long-term effects with surrogates, the partially linear model with an ML-predicted outcome,…

Single round-robin tournaments are widely regarded as unfair because of their home-away imbalance: some competitors play more home games than the others. Therefore, most sports leagues are played in a double round-robin format. However, some European football leagues contain a single round-robin (sub)tournament. To test whether empirical data can validate their unfairness, we construct a unique database and develop a strength of schedule metric based on…

We propose a test of whether the tail index of a heavy-tailed outcome is homogeneous across observed covariates. The key observation is that, under tail-index homogeneity, normalized log exceedances are asymptotically independent of the covariates even when tail frequencies vary with them. This leads to a simple-to-implement permutation test based on distance covariance, without estimating conditional tail indices or specifying the form of tail-index het…

I study randomization inference for dynamic causal effects in panels with many units and few periods when treatment is endogenous and an instrument is as good as randomly assigned only through the innovations of a first-order autoregressive assignment mechanism with unknown persistence. The persistence is a nuisance parameter in two senses: it determines which weighted average of heterogeneous causal effects the instrumented local projection estimand mea…

The most widely used investment risk measures - variance, standard deviation, and tracking error - treat upside deviations as equally undesirable as downside losses. In stable markets with assumed symmetric return distributions, this simplification is potentially harmless. In the climate transition age, it is not. Climate risk is two-dimensionally asymmetric, across assets and over time. Both dimensions are negatively skewed against investors. Hence, cli…

This paper provides moment conditions for dynamic multinomial logit panel data models with individual specific fixed effects. The moment conditions do not depend on the fixed effects and thus form the basis for generalized method of moments estimation. For a leading case, we provide sufficient conditions under which the moment conditions identify the common parameters, and we illustrate their use in an empirical application to household soft drink purcha…

Event studies with panel data are widely used to estimate treatment effects. With repeated cross-sections, future treatment dates are unobserved for untreated individuals. Pseudo-panel event studies impute pre-treatment outcomes of the treated using matched untreated individuals. This paper establishes identification in such designs and characterizes bias when identification conditions fail. I show that the pseudo-panel regression is equivalent to weight…

This paper develops likelihood-based estimation for parametric rational inattention--additive random utility models. We establish consistency and asymptotic normality of the exact maximum likelihood estimator and provide conditions under which the simulated estimator shares its asymptotic distribution. To implement estimation, we develop Newton--BA, a KKT-guided hybrid of Newton--Raphson and Blahut--Arimoto (BA). The algorithm accommodates both interior…

We propose a heteroskedasticity-robust and dimention-adaptive test for multiple linear restric- tions in sparse high-dimensional linear regression models. It combines desparsified LASSO estimation with a ridge-regularized quadratic form statistic and critical values that adapt to the restriction dimension. Under stated regularity conditions, our approach is asymptotically valid under a fixed or diverging number of restrictions without specifying the asym…

In this paper, we develop an asymptotically normal estimator for the value of policy improvement (VPI) under adaptively collected data. This value, which is defined as the gap between the value of the best treatment policy in a class and that of a baseline policy, gauges whether or not it is worth deploying a personalized treatment policy. Building an estimator for the VPI is naturally more difficult than estimating the value of a fixed policy. This is b…

Researchers and policymakers frequently make a large number of decisions simultaneously over many units using noisy estimates of unit-level effects. Researchers often assume that unit-level effects are drawn from a common effect distribution, allowing for optimal decision-making. In applications, however, this effect distribution is unknown to the econometrician, introducing uncertainty in the ultimate decision-making problem. This paper considers the pr…

This paper examines the use of recurrent neural networks and their extensions for forecasting autoregressive causal-noncausal processes, characterized by local explosive patterns such as bubbles and spikes. We study the recurrent neural networks (RNN), long short-term memory networks (LSTM), gated recurrent unit (GRU), bidirectional LSTM, and also a simple feed-forward network (FNN) to reveal the difficulty of forecasting extreme values depending on the…

This paper extends the finite-population asymptotic framework of Abadie et al. (2014,2020) to the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator for moment condition models. Motivating examples include instrumental variable regressions and regression adjustments under randomized controlled trials. We establish consistency and asymptotic normality of the GMM estimator and propose conservative variance estimators. We also study GMM weighting, misspecificati…

Randomized experiments are often linked to administrative data to measure outcomes, but coarse identifiers can leave multiple administrative records consistent with each experimental unit. We show that unbiased estimation of the sample average treatment effect is possible without resolving these ambiguous links or specifying an outcome model. Our key linkage requirement is that the true administrative outcome is contained among the candidate outcomes for…