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: Nov, 2022, Volume 90, Issue 6

Spatial Correlation Robust Inference

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA19465
p. 2901-2935

Ulrich K. Müller, Mark W. Watson

We propose a method for constructing confidence intervals that account for many forms of spatial correlation. The interval has the familiar “estimator plus and minus a standard error times a critical value” form, but we propose new methods for constructing the standard error and the critical value. The standard error is constructed using population principal components from a given “worst‐case” spatial correlation model. The critical value is chosen to ensure coverage in a benchmark parametric model for the spatial correlations. The method is shown to control coverage in finite sample Gaussian settings in a restricted but nonparametric class of models and in large samples whenever the spatial correlation is weak, that is, with average pairwise correlations that vanish as the sample size gets large. We also provide results on the efficiency of the method.


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Supplemental Material

Supplement to "Spatial Correlation Robust Inference"

Ulrich K. Müller and Mark W. Watson

This zip file contains the replication files for the manuscript.