Instrumental variables quantile regression for panel data with measurement errors

This paper develops an instrumental variables estimator for quantile regression in panel data with fixed effects. Asymptotic properties of the instrumental variables estimator are studied for large N and T when Na/T ! 0, for some a > 0. Wald and Kolmogorov-Smirnov type tests for general linear restrictions are developed. The estimator is applied to the problem of measurement errors in variables, which induces endogeneity and as a result bias in the model. We derive an approximation to the bias in the quantile regression fixed effects estimator in the presence of measurement error and show its connection to similar effects in standard least squares models. Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to evaluate the finite sample properties of the estimator in terms of bias and root mean squared error. Finally, the methods are applied to a model of firm investment. The results show interesting heterogeneity in the Tobin’s q and cash flow sensitivities of investment. In both cases, the sensitivities are monotonically increasing along the quantiles

Global sensitivity analysis for stochastic simulators based on generalized lambda surrogate models

Global sensitivity analysis aims at quantifying the impact of input variability onto the variation of the response of a computational model. It has been widely applied to deterministic simulators, for which a set of input parameters has a unique corresponding output value. Stochastic simulators, however, have intrinsic randomness due to their use of (pseudo)random numbers, so they give different results when run twice with the same input parameters but non-common random numbers. Due to this random nature, conventional Sobol' indices, used in global sensitivity analysis, can be extended to stochastic simulators in different ways. In this paper, we discuss three possible extensions and focus on those that depend only on the statistical dependence between input and output. This choice ignores the detailed data generating process involving the internal randomness, and can thus be applied to a wider class of problems. We propose to use the generalized lambda model to emulate the response distribution of stochastic simulators. Such a surrogate can be constructed without the need for replications. The proposed method is applied to three examples including two case studies in finance and epidemiology. The results confirm the convergence of the approach for estimating the sensitivity indices even with the presence of strong heteroskedasticity and small signal-to-noise ratio