A Nearly Similar Powerful Test for Mediation

Kees Jan van Garderen and Noud van Giersbergen

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: This paper derives a new powerful test for mediation that is easy to use. Testing for mediation is empirically very important in psychology, sociology, medicine, economics and business, generating over 100,000 citations to a single key paper. The no-mediation hypothesis $H_{0}:\theta_{1}\theta _{2}=0$ also poses a theoretically interesting statistical problem since it defines a manifold that is non-regular in the origin where rejection probabilities of standard tests are extremely low. We prove that a similar test for mediation only exists if the size is the reciprocal of an integer. It is unique, but has objectionable properties. We propose a new test that is nearly similar with power close to the envelope without these abject properties and is easy to use in practice. Construction uses the general varying $g$-method that we propose. We illustrate the results in an educational setting with gender role beliefs and in a trade union sentiment application.

Date: 2020-12, Revised 2022-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.11342 Latest version (application/pdf)

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:arx:papers:2012.11342

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().