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: Jul, 2015, Volume 83, Issue 4

Linear Regression for Panel With Unknown Number of Factors as Interactive Fixed Effects

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA9382
p. 1543-1579

H. R. Moon and M. Weidner

In this paper, we study the least squares (LS) estimator in a linear panel regression model with number of factors appearing as interactive fixed effects. Assuming that the number of factors used in estimation is larger than the true number of factors in the data, we establish the limiting distribution of the LS estimator for the regression coefficients as the number of time periods and the number of cross‐sectional units jointly go to infinity. The main result of the paper is that under certain assumptions, the limiting distribution of the LS estimator is independent of the number of factors used in the estimation as long as this number is not underestimated. The important practical implication of this result is that for inference on the regression coefficients, one does not necessarily need to estimate the number of interactive fixed effects consistently.


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Supplement to "Linear Regression for Panel with Unknown Number of Factors as Interactive Fixed Effects"

This zip file contains the replication files for the manuscript and a supplemental appendix.