Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2009
This paper investigates selection and averaging of linear regressions with a possible structural break. Our main contribution is the construction of a Mallows criterion for the structural break model. We show that the correct penalty term is nonstandard and depends on unknown parameters, but it can be approximated by an average of limiting cases to yield a feasible penalty with good performance. Following Hansen (2007, Econometrica 75, 1175–1189) we recommend averaging the structural break estimates with the no-break estimates where the weight is selected to minimize the Mallows criterion. This estimator is simple to compute, as the weights are a simple function of the ratio of the penalty to the Andrews SupF test statistic.
To assess performance we focus on asymptotic mean-squared error (AMSE) in a local asymptotic framework. We show that the AMSE of the estimators depends exclusively on the parameter variation function. Numerical comparisons show that the unrestricted least-squares and pretest estimators have very large AMSE for certain regions of the parameter space, whereas our averaging estimator has AMSE close to the infeasible optimum.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.