SMOOTHED EMPIRICAL LIKELIHOOD METHODS FOR QUANTILE REGRESSION MODELS

This paper considers an empirical likelihood method to estimate the parameters of the quantile regression (QR) models and to construct confidence regions that are accurate in finite samples. To achieve the higher order refinements, we smooth the estimating equations for the empirical likelihood. We show that the smoothed empirical likelihood estimator is first-order asymptotically equivalent to the standard QR estimator and establish that confidence regions based on the smoothed empirical likelihood ratio have coverage errors of order n−1 and may be Bartlett corrected to produce regions with errors of order n−2, where n denotes the sample size. Our result is an extension of the previous result of Chen and Hall (1993, Annals of Statistics 21, 1166–1181) to the regression context. Monte Carlo experiments suggest that the smoothed empirical likelihood confidence regions may be more accurate in small samples than the confidence regions that can be constructed from the smoothed bootstrap method recently suggested by Horowitz (1998, Econometrica 66, 1327–1351).I thank the co-editor Bruce Hansen and anonymous referees for valuable suggestions and comments. I also thank Song X. Chen, Joel Horowitz, Yuichi Kitamura, Oliver Linton, Whitney Newey, Peter Phillips, and Richard Smith for helpful comments. Parts of this paper were written while I was visiting the Cowles Foundation at Yale University, whose hospitality is gratefully acknowledged. Young-Hyun Cho has provided excellent research assistance. This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation grant KRF 2003-041-B00072.

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