Effect of nonnormality on the asymptotic property of three estimators of a single structural equation with structural change is examined. The three estimators are the limited information maximum likelihood estimator, derived under normality and equality of structural variances in different samples, given by Hodoshima, a two-stage least squares type estimator due to Barten and Bronsard, and a minimum distance estimator presented here. Normality is relaxed but the equality assumption of structural variances is retained. Under nonnormality the limited information maximum likelihood estimator is consistent but may not be efficient relative to the Barten and Bronsard's estimator. A sufficient condition is given under which the limited information maximum likelihood estimator dominates the Barten and Bronsard's estimator in terms of the asymptotic covariance matrix. The minimum distance estimator dominates other estimators.

This paper develops a test for homogeneity of the threshold parameter in threshold regression models. The test has a natural interpretation from time series perspectives and can also be applied to test for additional change points in the structural break models. The limiting distribution of the test statistic is derived, and the finite sample properties are studied in Monte Carlo simulations. We apply the new test to the tipping point problem studied by Card, Mas, and Rothstein (2008, Quarterly Journal of Economics 123, 177–218) and statistically justify that the location of the tipping point varies across tracts.

By pointing out the spurious regression problem, Granger and Newbold (1974) have shown the importance of stochastic trends in time series data in the context of linear regression models. At the time, removing trends by differencing was already common practice in univariate time series modeling as part of the Box–Jenkins approach (Box and Jenkins, 1976). These new developments, however, emphasized the importance of autoregressive (AR) unit roots and motivated the development of statistical procedures for their detection. Dickey and Fuller (1979) and Fuller (1976) were pioneers in developing tests for unit roots that became widely used. The foundation of asymptotic theory for regressions involving stochastic trends was led by Phillips (1986, 1987) with the introduction of the functional limit theory, weak convergence methods, convergence to stochastic integrals, nonparametric unit root testing, and continuous record asymptotics. Phillips and Durlauf (1986) extended some of these results to the multivariate setting by presenting the multivariate invariance principles and the asymptotic theory of multivariate nonstationary and cointegrating regressions. These contributions provided the asymptotic tools that have served as the basis for most of the limit results derived in the context of unit root nonstationarity, and they have stimulated extensive subsequent research.We are grateful to Peter Phillips for proposing a special issue of Econometric Theory for papers from our conference Unit Root and Cointegration Testing. We thank all participants of the conference who contributed their papers to this special issue. We are also very grateful to those colleagues who agreed to serve as referees for the papers. They not only provided generous help through comments but also respected our rather tight deadlines. We are grateful to all those who helped us to complete the special issue unusually fast. To protect their identities, we do not list them here. They will be included in the general list of referees for Econometric Theory. Our conference would not have been possible without the generous financial support of a number of sponsors. We are grateful to the Bank of Portugal, to the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT), to the Luso-American Foundation for Development (FLAD), and to the Journal of Applied Econometrics for their financial support.

This paper is concerned with the practical problem of conducting inference in a vector time series setting when the data are unbalanced or incomplete. In this case, one can work with only the common sample, to which a standard HAC/bootstrap theory applies, but at the expense of throwing away data and perhaps losing efficiency. An alternative is to use some sort of imputation method, but this requires additional modeling assumptions, which we would rather avoid. We show how the sampling theory changes and how to modify the resampling algorithms to accommodate the problem of missing data. We also discuss efficiency and power. Unbalanced data of the type we consider are quite common in financial panel data; see, for example, Connor and Korajczyk (1993, Journal of Finance 48, 1263–1291). These data also occur in cross-country studies.I thank Greg Connor, Esfandiar Maasoumi, Peter Phillips, Peter Robinson, Yoon Whang, and two referees for helpful comments.

This problem discusses an I(2) model in the VAR(1) case. The I(2) representation theorem of Johansen (1992) (JRT) holds also for VAR(1) processes. The I(2) model for VAR(k) processes has been discussed for k ≥ 2 in Johansen (1996, Ch. 9; 1997). We here discuss a parametrization for the I(2) case of VAR(1) that differs from the VAR(k) model.

This paper analyzes the higher-order approximation of instrumental variable (IV) estimators in a linear homoskedastic IV regression model when a large set of instruments with potential invalidity is present. We establish theoretical results on the higher-order mean-squared error (MSE) approximation of the two-stage least-squares (2SLS), the limited information maximum likelihood (LIML), the Fuller (FULL), the bias-adjusted 2SLS, and jackknife version of the LIML and FULL estimators by allowing for local violations of the instrument exogeneity conditions. Based on the approximation to the higher-order MSE, we consider the instrument selection criteria that can be used to choose among the set of available instruments. We demonstrate the asymptotic optimality of the instrument selection procedure proposed by Donald and Newey (2001, Econometrica 69, 1161–1191) in the presence of locally (faster than $N^{-1/2}$) invalid instruments in the sense that the dominant term in the MSE with the chosen instrument is asymptotically equivalent to the infeasible optimum. Furthermore, we propose instrument selection procedures to choose instruments among the sets of conservative (known) valid instruments and potentially locally ($N^{-1/2}$) invalid instruments based on the higher-order MSE of the IV estimators by considering the bias-variance trade-off.

In this paper, we first transform a set of moment conditions into a set of transformed moment conditions, based on which the efficient partial generalized method of moments estimation for part of a parameter vector is defined. Given the set of transformed moment conditions, we then show that the conditions for partial redundancy of an additional set of moment conditions given an original set of moment conditions simply become the conditions for full redundancy of the second subset of transformed moment conditions given the first subset of transformed moment conditions. Thus the transformed moment conditions proposed in this paper unify partial redundancy of moment conditions with full redundancy of moment conditions. Using transformed moment conditions, we then straightforwardly derive necessary and sufficient conditions for partial redundancy of one or two subset(s) of moment conditions given the other when the large set of moment conditions consists of three subsets of moment conditions. The paper also provides several easily checkable sufficient conditions for partial redundancy of one set of moment conditions given other sets of moment conditions.

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.

Let α* be any basis of col(Π) and β* be any basis of col(Π′); we note col(α⊥) = col(α*⊥), col(β⊥) = col(β*⊥) so no distinction is made between α⊥ and α*⊥, β⊥ and β*⊥ in the following discussion.

We consider high-frequency observations from a one-dimensional time-homogeneous diffusion process Y. We assume that the diffusion coefficient $\sigma $ is continuously differentiable in y, but with a jump discontinuity at some level y, say $y=0$. We first study sign-constrained kernel estimators of functions of the left and right limits of $\sigma $ at $0$. These functions intricately depend on both limits. We propose a method to extricate these functions by searching for bandwidths where the kernel estimators are stable by iteration. We finally provide an estimator of the discontinuity jump size. We prove its convergence in probability and discuss its rate of convergence. A Monte Carlo study shows the finite sample properties of this estimator.