Discretizing Unobserved Heterogeneity

Stéphane Bonhomme, Thibaut Lamadon and Elena Manresa ()
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Elena Manresa: Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Sloan School of Mangement, Postal: USA

No 2017:21, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: We study panel data estimators based on a discretization of unobserved heterogeneity when individual heterogeneity is not necessarily discrete in the population. We focus on two-step grouped-fixed effects estimators, where individuals are classified into groups in a first step using kmeans clustering, and the model is estimated in a second step allowing for group-specific heterogeneity. We analyze the asymptotic properties of these discrete estimators as the number of groups grows with the sample size, and we show that bias reduction techniques can improve their performance. In addition to reducing the number of parameters, grouped fixed-effects methods provide effective regularization. When allowing for the presence of time-varying unobserved heterogeneity, we show they enjoy fast rates of convergence depending of the underlying dimension of heterogeneity. Finally, we document the finite sample properties of two-step grouped fixed-effects estimators in two applications: a structural dynamic discrete choice model of migration, and a model of wages with worker and firm heterogeneity.

Keywords: dimension reduction; panel data; structural models; kmeans clustering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 C38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 110 pages
Date: 2017-11-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Discretizing Unobserved Heterogeneity (2021)
Working Paper: Discretizing unobserved heterogeneity (2017)
Working Paper: Discretizing Unobserved Heterogeneity (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2017_021

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