Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Jan, 2022, Volume 90, Issue 1

Identification and Estimation of a Partially Linear Regression Model using Network Data

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA19794
p. 347-365

Eric Auerbach

I study a regression model in which one covariate is an unknown function of a latent driver of link formation in a network. Rather than specify and fit a parametric network formation model, I introduce a new method based on matching pairs of agents with similar columns of the squared adjacency matrix, the ijth entry of which contains the number of other agents linked to both agents i and j. The intuition behind this approach is that for a large class of network formation models the columns of the squared adjacency matrix characterize all of the identifiable information about individual linking behavior. In this paper, I describe the model, formalize this intuition, and provide consistent estimators for the parameters of the regression model.


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