Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2021
Under a Mundlak-type correlated random effect (CRE) specification, we first show that the average likelihood of a parametric nonlinear panel data model is the convolution of the conditional distribution of the model and the distribution of the unobserved heterogeneity. Hence, the distribution of the unobserved heterogeneity can be recovered by means of a Fourier transformation without imposing a distributional assumption on the CRE specification. We subsequently construct a semiparametric family of average likelihood functions of observables by combining the conditional distribution of the model and the recovered distribution of the unobserved heterogeneity, and show that the parameters in the nonlinear panel data model and in the CRE specification are identifiable. Based on the identification result, we propose a sieve maximum likelihood estimator. Compared with the conventional parametric CRE approaches, the advantage of our method is that it is not subject to misspecification on the distribution of the CRE. Furthermore, we show that the average partial effects are identifiable and extend our results to dynamic nonlinear panel data models.
The authors are grateful to the co-editor, three anonymous referees, Arthur Lewbel, and Matthew Shum for valuable comments and suggestions on previous versions of the paper. The authors are indebted to the editor Peter Phillips for constructive advice and comments, which have considerably improved the presentation of the paper. The authors are solely responsible for any remaining errors. Yu-Chin Hsu gratefully acknowledges research support from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (MOST107-2410-H-001-034-MY3) and Career Development Award of Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Ji-Liang Shiu acknowledges support from the China National Science Foundation (Project No. 72073050).