Bootstrap validity for the score test when instruments may be weak

Abstract

It is well-known that size adjustments based on bootstrapping the t-statistic perform poorly when instruments are weakly correlated with the endogenous explanatory variable. In this paper, we provide a theoretical proof that guarantees the validity of the bootstrap for the score statistic. This theory does not follow from standard results, since the score statistic is not a smooth function of sample means and some parameters are not consistently estimable when the instruments are uncorrelated with the explanatory variable. © 2008 Elsevier B.V.