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This paper presents the gretl function package DPB for estimating dynamic binary models with panel data. The package contains routines for the estimation of the randomeffects dynamic probit model proposed by Heckman (1981b) and its generalisation by Hyslop (1999) and Keane and Sauer (2009) to accommodate AR(1) disturbances. The fixed-effects estimator by Bartolucci and Nigro (2010) is also implemented. DPB is available on the gretl function packages archive.

gretl is a general-purpose econometric package, whose most important characteristic is being free software. This ensures that its source code is freely available under the general public license (GPL) and, like most GPL software, that it can be used free of charge. As of version 1.8.1 (released in May 2009), it offers a mechanism for handling linear state space models in a reasonably general and efficient way. This article illustrates its main features with two examples.

The issue of identification of covariance structures, which arises in a number of different contexts, has been so far linked to conditions on the true parameters to be estimated. In this paper, this limitation is removed.As done by Johansen (1995, Journal of Econometrics 69, 112–132) in the context of linear models, the present paper provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the identification of a covariance structure that depends only on the constraints and can therefore be checked independently of estimated parameters.DEstructure condition is developed, which only depends on the structure of the constraints. It is shown that this condition, if coupled with the familiar order condition, provides a sufficient condition for identification. In practice, because the structure condition holds if and only if a certain matrix, constructed from the constraint matrices, is invertible, automatic software checking for identification is feasible even for large-scale systems.Most of the paper focuses on structural vector autoregressions, but extensions to other statistical models are also briefly discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]