Assessing Validity and Application Scope of the Intrinsic Estimator Approach to the Age-Period-Cohort Problem

Liying Luo ()

Demography, 2013, vol. 50, issue 6, 1945-1967

Abstract: In many different fields, social scientists desire to understand temporal variation associated with age, time period, and cohort membership. Among methods proposed to address the identification problem in age-period-cohort analysis, the intrinsic estimator (IE) is reputed to impose few assumptions and to yield good estimates of the independent effects of age, period, and cohort groups. This article assesses the validity and application scope of IE theoretically and illustrates its properties with simulations. It shows that IE implicitly assumes a constraint on the linear age, period, and cohort effects. This constraint not only depends on the number of age, period, and cohort categories but also has nontrivial implications for estimation. Because this assumption is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to verify in empirical research, IE cannot and should not be used to estimate age, period, and cohort effects. Copyright Population Association of America 2013

Keywords: Age-period-cohort analysis; Intrinsic estimator; Identification problem; Constrained estimator; Linear constraint (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s13524-013-0243-z (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:demogr:v:50:y:2013:i:6:p:1945-1967

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13524

DOI: 10.1007/s13524-013-0243-z

Access Statistics for this article

Demography is currently edited by John D. Iceland, Stephen A. Matthews and Jenny Van Hook

More articles in Demography from Springer, Population Association of America (PAA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().