EconBase
← All papers

Confidence intervals for intentionally biased estimators

David M. Kaplan, Xin Liu

arXiv 1 Feb 2025 · Econometrics · publishedEconometric Reviews (2024) · 2 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2502.00450 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

We propose and study three confidence intervals (CIs) centered at an estimator that is intentionally biased to reduce mean squared error. The first CI simply uses an unbiased estimator's standard error; compared to centering at the unbiased estimator, this CI has higher coverage probability for confidence levels above 91.7%, even if the biased and unbiased estimators have equal mean squared error. The second CI trades some of this "excess" coverage for shorter length. The third CI is centered at a convex combination of the two estimators to further reduce length. Practically, these CIs apply broadly and are simple to compute.

Citation extraction

36
references
77
in-text mentions
36
distinct cited
3
self-citations
10,382
main-text words

appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 94% 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
1Kaplan, David M. and Yixiao Sun (2017) Smoothed Estimating Equations for Instrumental Variables Quantile Regression self1.00083100%
2Armstrong, Timothy B. and Michal Kolesár (2021) Sensitivity analysis using approximate moment condition models1.00064100%
3Fernandes, Marcelo, Emmanuel Guerre, and Eduardo Horta (2021) Smoothing Quantile Regressions1.00053100%
4He, Xuming, Xiaoou Pan, Kean Ming Tan, and Wen-Xin Zhou (2023) Smoothed quantile regression with large-scale inference1.00053100%
5Cheng, Xu, Zhipeng Liao, and Ruoyao Shi (2019) On Uniform Asymptotic Risk of Averaging GMM Estimators0.92843100%
6Hansen, Bruce E (2017) A Stein-Like 2SLS Estimator0.92843100%
7Angrist, Joshua, Victor Chernozhukov, and Iván Fernández-Val (2006) Quantile Regression under Misspecification, with an Application to the U.S. Wage Structure0.87452100%
8Chernozhukov, Victor and Christian Hansen (2006) Instrumental quantile regression inference for structural and treatment effect models0.73732100%
9Groeneboom, Piet, Geurt Jongbloed, and Birgit I. Witte (2010) Maximum smoothed likelihood estimation and smoothed maximum likelihood estimation in the current status model0.73732100%
10Horowitz, Joel L (1992) A smoothed maximum score estimator for the binary response model0.73732100%

Showing the top 10 of 36 scored citations.