Quasi Empirical Likelihood Estimation of Moment Condition Models

In this paper, I develop a quasi empirical likelihood estimator that has good finite-sample properties when there are many moment conditions. I show that the quasi empirical likelihood estimator, which uses semiparametric efficient estimation, is an approximation to the empirical likelihood estimator, which has been shown to have good statistical properties. The quasi empirical likelihood estimator is a consistent estimator and has a normal asymptotic distribution. As with the full-blown empirical likelihood estimator, the quasi empirical likelihood estimator reduces finite-sample bias, but is much simpler to compute than the empirical likelihood estimator. Monte Carlo experiments and a quick validation exercise confirm my theoretical results