No Arabic abstract
Using and extending fractional order statistic theory, we characterize the $O(n^{-1})$ coverage probability error of the previously proposed confidence intervals for population quantiles using $L$-statistics as endpoints in Hutson (1999). We derive an analytic expression for the $n^{-1}$ term, which may be used to calibrate the nominal coverage level to get $Obigl(n^{-3/2}[log(n)]^3bigr)$ coverage error. Asymptotic power is shown to be optimal. Using kernel smoothing, we propose a related method for nonparametric inference on conditional quantiles. This new method compares favorably with asymptotic normality and bootstrap methods in theory and in simulations. Code is available from the second authors website for both unconditional and conditional methods, simulations, and empirical examples.
We propose two types of Quantile Graphical Models (QGMs) --- Conditional Independence Quantile Graphical Models (CIQGMs) and Prediction Quantile Graphical Models (PQGMs). CIQGMs characterize the conditional independence of distributions by evaluating the distributional dependence structure at each quantile index. As such, CIQGMs can be used for validation of the graph structure in the causal graphical models (cite{pearl2009causality, robins1986new, heckman2015causal}). One main advantage of these models is that we can apply them to large collections of variables driven by non-Gaussian and non-separable shocks. PQGMs characterize the statistical dependencies through the graphs of the best linear predictors under asymmetric loss functions. PQGMs make weaker assumptions than CIQGMs as they allow for misspecification. Because of QGMs ability to handle large collections of variables and focus on specific parts of the distributions, we could apply them to quantify tail interdependence. The resulting tail risk network can be used for measuring systemic risk contributions that help make inroads in understanding international financial contagion and dependence structures of returns under downside market movements. We develop estimation and inference methods for QGMs focusing on the high-dimensional case, where the number of variables in the graph is large compared to the number of observations. For CIQGMs, these methods and results include valid simultaneous choices of penalty functions, uniform rates of convergence, and confidence regions that are simultaneously valid. We also derive analogous results for PQGMs, which include new results for penalized quantile regressions in high-dimensional settings to handle misspecification, many controls, and a continuum of additional conditioning events.
Quantile regression is an increasingly important empirical tool in economics and other sciences for analyzing the impact of a set of regressors on the conditional distribution of an outcome. Extremal quantile regression, or quantile regression applied to the tails, is of interest in many economic and financial applications, such as conditional value-at-risk, production efficiency, and adjustment bands in (S,s) models. In this paper we provide feasible inference tools for extremal conditional quantile models that rely upon extreme value approximations to the distribution of self-normalized quantile regression statistics. The methods are simple to implement and can be of independent interest even in the non-regression case. We illustrate the results with two empirical examples analyzing extreme fluctuations of a stock return and extremely low percentiles of live infants birthweights in the range between 250 and 1500 grams.
This paper develops theory for feasible estimators of finite-dimensional parameters identified by general conditional quantile restrictions, under much weaker assumptions than previously seen in the literature. This includes instrumental variables nonlinear quantile regression as a special case. More specifically, we consider a set of unconditional moments implied by the conditional quantile restrictions, providing conditions for local identification. Since estimators based on the sample moments are generally impossible to compute numerically in practice, we study feasible estimators based on smoothed sample moments. We propose a method of moments estimator for exactly identified models, as well as a generalized method of moments estimator for over-identified models. We establish consistency and asymptotic normality of both estimators under general conditions that allow for weakly dependent data and nonlinear structural models. Simulations illustrate the finite-sample properties of the methods. Our in-depth empirical application concerns the consumption Euler equation derived from quantile utility maximization. Advantages of the quantile Euler equation include robustness to fat tails, decoupling of risk attitude from the elasticity of intertemporal substitution, and log-linearization without any approximation error. For the four countries we examine, the quantile estimates of discount factor and elasticity of intertemporal substitution are economically reasonable for a range of quantiles above the median, even when two-stage least squares estimates are not reasonable.
This paper considers the problem of testing many moment inequalities where the number of moment inequalities, denoted by $p$, is possibly much larger than the sample size $n$. There is a variety of economic applications where solving this problem allows to carry out inference on causal and structural parameters, a notable example is the market structure model of Ciliberto and Tamer (2009) where $p=2^{m+1}$ with $m$ being the number of firms that could possibly enter the market. We consider the test statistic given by the maximum of $p$ Studentized (or $t$-type) inequality-specific statistics, and analyze various ways to compute critical values for the test statistic. Specifically, we consider critical values based upon (i) the union bound combined with a moderate deviation inequality for self-normalized sums, (ii) the multiplier and empirical bootstraps, and (iii) two-step and three-step variants of (i) and (ii) by incorporating the selection of uninformative inequalities that are far from being binding and a novel selection of weakly informative inequalities that are potentially binding but do not provide first order information. We prove validity of these methods, showing that under mild conditions, they lead to tests with the error in size decreasing polynomially in $n$ while allowing for $p$ being much larger than $n$, indeed $p$ can be of order $exp (n^{c})$ for some $c > 0$. Importantly, all these results hold without any restriction on the correlation structure between $p$ Studentized statistics, and also hold uniformly with respect to suitably large classes of underlying distributions. Moreover, in the online supplement, we show validity of a test based on the block multiplier bootstrap in the case of dependent data under some general mixing conditions.
The R package quantreg.nonpar implements nonparametric quantile regression methods to estimate and make inference on partially linear quantile models. quantreg.nonpar obtains point estimates of the conditional quantile function and its derivatives based on series approximations to the nonparametric part of the model. It also provides pointwise and uniform confidence intervals over a region of covariate values and/or quantile indices for the same functions using analytical and resampling methods. This paper serves as an introduction to the package and displays basic functionality of the functions contained within.