Properties of the Conditional Likelihood Ratio Test under Discrete Approximation

Marcelo J. Moreira; Mahrad Sharifvaghefi

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arXiv · 2607.04380

Properties of the Conditional Likelihood Ratio Test under Discrete Approximation

Marcelo J. Moreira·Mahrad Sharifvaghefi

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Abstract

The conditional likelihood ratio (CLR) test is a valuable tool for inference under weak identification, with appealing theoretical properties in both linear and non-linear settings. Its implementation nevertheless requires minimizing a non-convex objective function, a difficulty long recognized even in the linear IV setting. While grid-based methods that provide a practical approximation may perform well in particular designs, such procedures do not guarantee that the resulting test preserves the theoretical properties of the CLR test uniformly across a class of data-generating processes. This paper examines the implementation challenges and their consequences for test size and power. In the linear IV settings, we contrast the grid-based method with the polynomial approach of Moreira, Newey, and Sharifvaghefi(2024), which guarantees global minimization and aligns computation with the theoretical properties of the CLR test.

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BibTeX RIS

Marcelo J. Moreira, Mahrad Sharifvaghefi. 2026-07-05. Properties of the Conditional Likelihood Ratio Test under Discrete Approximation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04380

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