Dynamic Structural Models: Problems and Prospects. Mixed Continuous Discrete Controls and Market Interactions

This paper reviews dynamic structural econometric models with both continuous and discrete controls, and those with market interactions. Its goal is to highlight techniques which enable researchers to obtain estimates of the parameters of models with these characteristics, and then use the estimates in subsequent descriptive and policy analysis. In an attempt to increase the accessibility of structural modeling, emphasis has been laid on estimation techniques which, though consistent with the underlying structural model, are computationally simple. The extent to which this is possible depends on the characteristics of the applied problem of interest, so the paper ends up covering more than one topic.