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A Note on the Regularized Approach to Biased 2SLS Estimation with Weak Instruments

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Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics

Published online on

Abstract

The presence of weak instruments is translated into a nearly singular problem in a control function representation. Therefore, the L2‐norm type of regularization is proposed to implement the 2SLS estimation for addressing the weak instrument problem. The L2‐norm regularization with a regularized parameter O(n) allows us to obtain the Rothenberg (1984) type of higher‐order approximation of the 2SLS estimator in the weak instrument asymptotic framework. The proposed regularized parameter yields the regularized concentration parameter O(n), which is used as a standardized factor in the higher‐order approximation. We also show that the proposed L2‐norm regularization consequently reduces the finite sample bias. A number of existing estimators that address finite sample bias in the presence of weak instruments, especially Fuller's limited information maximum likelihood estimator, are compared with our proposed estimator in a simple Monte Carlo exercise.