Power Bounds and Efficiency Loss for Asymptotically Optimal Tests in IV Regression

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Main Authors: Moreira, Marcelo J., Ridder, Geert, Sharifvaghefi, Mahrad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Moreira, Marcelo J.
Ridder, Geert
Sharifvaghefi, Mahrad
author_facet Moreira, Marcelo J.
Ridder, Geert
Sharifvaghefi, Mahrad
contents We characterize the maximal attainable power-size gap in overidentified instrumental variables models with heteroskedastic or autocorrelated (HAC) errors. Using total variation distance and Kraft's theorem, we define the decision theoretic frontier of the testing problem. We show that Lagrange multiplier and conditional quasi likelihood ratio tests can have power arbitrarily close to size even when the null and alternative are well separated, because they do not fully exploit the reduced-form likelihood. In contrast, the conditional likelihood ratio (CLR) test uses the full reduced-form likelihood. We prove that the power-size gap of CLR converges to one if and only if the testing problem becomes trivial in total variation distance, so that CLR attains the decision theoretic frontier whenever any test can. An empirical illustration based on Yogo (2004) shows that these failures arise in empirically relevant configurations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_21004
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Power Bounds and Efficiency Loss for Asymptotically Optimal Tests in IV Regression
Moreira, Marcelo J.
Ridder, Geert
Sharifvaghefi, Mahrad
Econometrics
Statistics Theory
We characterize the maximal attainable power-size gap in overidentified instrumental variables models with heteroskedastic or autocorrelated (HAC) errors. Using total variation distance and Kraft's theorem, we define the decision theoretic frontier of the testing problem. We show that Lagrange multiplier and conditional quasi likelihood ratio tests can have power arbitrarily close to size even when the null and alternative are well separated, because they do not fully exploit the reduced-form likelihood. In contrast, the conditional likelihood ratio (CLR) test uses the full reduced-form likelihood. We prove that the power-size gap of CLR converges to one if and only if the testing problem becomes trivial in total variation distance, so that CLR attains the decision theoretic frontier whenever any test can. An empirical illustration based on Yogo (2004) shows that these failures arise in empirically relevant configurations.
title Power Bounds and Efficiency Loss for Asymptotically Optimal Tests in IV Regression
topic Econometrics
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21004