Working Paper

Higher order properties of GMM and generalised empirical likelihood estimators

Authors

Whitney K. Newey, Richard Smith

Published Date

1 June 2003

Type

Working Paper (CWP04/03)

In an effort to improve the small sample properties of generalized method of moments(GMM) estimators, a number of alternative estimators have been suggested. These include empirical likelihood (EL), continuous updating, and exponential tilting estimators. We show that these estimators share a common structure, beingmembers of a class of generalized empirical likelihood (GEL) estimators. We use this structure to compare their higher order asymptotic properties. We find that GEL has no asymptotic bias due to correlation of the moment functions with their Jacobian, eliminating an important source of bias for GMM in models with endogeneity. We also find that EL has no asymptotic bias from estimating the optimalweight matrix, eliminating a further important source of bias for GMM in panel data models. We give bias corrected GMM and GEL estimators. We also show that bias corrected EL inherits the higher order property of maximum likelihood,that it is higher order asymptotically effcient relative to the other bias corrected estimators.