Empirical Evidence Concerning the Finite Sample Performance of EL-Type Structural Equation Estimation and Inference Methods

This paper presents empirical evidence concerning the finite sample performance of conventional and generalized empirical likelihood-type estimators that utilize instruments in the context of linear structural models characterized by endogenous explanatory variables. There are suggestions in the literature that traditional and non-traditional asymptotically efficient estimators based on moment equations may, for the relatively small sample sizes usually encountered in econometric practice, have relatively large biases and/or variances and provide an inadequate basis for estimation and inference. Given this uncertainty we use a range of data sampling processes and Monte Carlo sampling procedures to accumulate finite sample empirical evidence concerning these questions for a family of generalized empirical likelihood-type estimators in comparison to conventional 2SLS and GMM estimators. Solutions to EL-type empirical moment-constrained optimization problems present formidable numerical challenges. We identify effective optimization algorithms for meeting these challenges.