EconBase
← All papers

Are Unobservables Separable?

Andrii Babii, Jean-Pierre Florens

arXiv 3 May 2017 · Mathematics — Statistics Theory

arXiv:1705.01654 · PDF · Extracted main text

Abstract

It is common to assume in empirical research that observables and unobservables are additively separable, especially, when the former are endogenous. This is done because it is widely recognized that identification and estimation challenges arise when interactions between the two are allowed for. Starting from a nonseparable IV model, where the instrumental variable is independent of unobservables, we develop a novel nonparametric test of separability of unobservables. The large-sample distribution of the test statistics is nonstandard and relies on a novel Donsker-type central limit theorem for the empirical distribution of nonparametric IV residuals, which may be of independent interest. Using a dataset drawn from the 2015 US Consumer Expenditure Survey, we find that the test rejects the separability in Engel curves for most of the commodities.

Citation extraction

62
references
101
in-text mentions
62
distinct cited
4
self-citations
16,294
main-text words

appendix boundary found by none_found · 100% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1van der Vaart and Wellner (1996) Weak convergence and empirical processes: with applications to statistics1.00064100%
2Engl, Hanke, and Neubauer (2000) Regularization of inverse problems1.00063100%
3Blundell, Chen, and Kristensen (2007) Semi-nonparametric IV estimation of shape-invariant Engel curves0.92843100%
4Darolles, Fan, Florens, and Renault (2011) Nonparametric instrumental regression0.92843100%
5Gagliardini and Scaillet (2012) Tikhonov regularization for nonparametric instrumental variable estimators0.92843100%
6Carrasco, Florens, and Renault (2014) Asymptotic Normal Inference in Linear Inverse Problems0.84333100%
7Nickl and Pötscher (2007) Bracketing metric entropy rates and empirical central limit theorems for function classes of Besov- and Sobolev-type0.84333100%
8Horowitz and Lee (2007) Nonparametric instrumental variables estimation of a quantile regression model0.73732100%
9Newey and Powell (2003) Instrumental variable estimation of nonparametric models0.73732100%
10Babii and Florens (2020) Is completeness necessary? Estimation in nonidentified linear models0.64422100%

Showing the top 10 of 62 scored citations.