Sieve Quasi Likelihood Ratio Inference on Semi/nonparametric Conditional Moment Models

This paper considers inference on functionals of semi/nonparametric conditional moment restrictions with possibly nonsmooth generalized residuals. These models belong to the difficult (nonlinear) ill-posed inverse problems with unknown operators, and include all of the (nonlinear) nonparametric instrumental variables (IV) as special cases. For these models it is generally difficult to verify whether a functional is regular (i.e., root-n estimable) or irregular (i.e., slower than root-n estimable). In this paper we provide computationally simple, unified inference procedures that are asymptotically valid regardless of whether a functional is regular or irregular. We establish the following new results: (1) the asymptotic normality of the plug-in penalized sieve minimum distance (PSMD) estimators of the (possibly irregular) functionals; (2) the consistency of sieve variance estimators of the plug-in PSMD estimators; (3) the asymptotic chi-square distribution of an optimally weighted sieve quasi likelihood ratio (SQLR) statistic; (4) the asymptotic tight distribution of a possibly non-optimally weighted SQLR statistic; (5) the consistency of the nonparametric bootstrap and the weighted bootstrap (possibly non-optimally weighted) SQLR and sieve Wald statistics, which are proved under virtually the same conditions as those for the original-sample statistics. Small simulation studies and an empirical illustration of a nonparametric quantile IV regression are presented.