The fact that weak instruments lead to spurious inference is now widely recognized. In this paper we ask whether spurious inference occurs more generally in weakly identified models. To distinguish between models where spurious inference will occur from those where it does not, we introduce the...

When the instrumental variable is a poor one, in the sense of being weakly correlated with the variable it proxies, the small sample distribution of the IV estimator is concentrated around a value that is inversely related to the feedback in the system and which is often further from the true...

New results on the exact small sample distribution of the instrumental variable estimator are presented by studying an important special case. The exact closed forms for the probability density and cumulative distribution functions are given. There are a number of surprising findings. The small...