Estimating the canonical disequilibrium model: asymptotic theory and finite sample properties

The purpose of this paper is to review the various available estimation techniques for the canonical disequilibrium model: full information maximum likelihood (FIML), pseudo maximum likelihood methods, and their simulated counterparts. The use of the latter was advocated by Laroque-Salanie (1989) when the model is analytically untractable. We provide some new asymptotic results for all of these methods and compare their behavior on finite samples using Monte Carlo simulations. It appears that FIML performs only slightly better than the second-order PML method, which in turn performs only slightly better than its simulated counterpart. Given the ease of implementation of the latter technique, these results strongly militate for its use.