*To those gretl users that engage in stochastic frontier analysis (SFA).*
(and also to those gretl users that intend to apply general regression
analysis but using maximum likelihood and wanting to allow for a
regression error with skewness).
I have been notified that the function package "SFspec" has been
approved and is now available in the gretl server.
The package implements the specification test of Papadopoulos A. and
Parmeter C. (2023), "A Specification Test for the Composed Error Term in
the Stochastic Frontier Model". /Economics Letters/, 233, 111390. In
Monte Carlo simulations, this test had best power among all the tests
that have been proposed for the SF model. It has been already named "the
PP specification test" and has been included in the "frontier" gretl
package as an after-estimation test of the chosen error specification.
But the SFspec package has a different purpose: It tests 12 different
null hypotheses. The test depends on an OLS regression only, so the idea
is to use it before maximum likelihood estimation, in order to get a
sense of which distributional assumptions are a good match with the
data, and which are not. Mostly, it tells you what /not/ to do, and then
leaves you with the decision which specification to select among those
that remain statistically admissible.
This test is not available to any other statistical or econometric package.
*/HOW IT WORKS/*
After starting a gretl session, uploading your data set, and installing
the package, you only need to define a gretl List of regressors, and
then in the GUI of the test, select the dependent variable and the
regressor List. Hit "OK" and in the script output window you will get
the results: the value of the test statistic and the associated p-value
for the 12 distributional null hypotheses, that are the combinations of
four zero-mean symmetric distributions for the noise component of the
error term (Uniform, Normal, Logistic, Laplace) and three for the
inefficiency component (Half Normal, Exponential, Generalized
Exponential). The test works as-is for both production and cost SF models.
Note: the test is applicable to inefficiency distributions that have
constant skewness and excess kurtosis, which in practice means that they
must have a single parameter. This is why it is not applicable to test
for inefficiency that follows the Truncated Normal (that has two
parameters and so varying skewness and excess kurtosis).
Opportunity given, the Generalized Exponential gives an inefficiency
component with its mode away from zero, see Papadopoulos, A. (2021).
"Stochastic frontier models using the Generalized Exponential
distribution./" Journal of Productivity Analysis/, /55/(1), 15-29.
--
Alecos Papadopoulos PhD
Affiliate Researcher
Dpt of Economics, Athens University of Economics and Business
Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research (IOBE)
web:
alecospapadopoulos.wordpress.com/
ORCID:0000-0003-2441-4550