Purposes By Any Means, Provided That This Copyright Notice Appears On All Such Copies. Giannini Foundation for Agricultural Economics 1Robust Estimators of Errors-In-Variables Models

It is well known that consistent estimators of errors-in-variables models require knowledge of the ratio of error variances. What is not well known is that a Joint Least Squares estimator is robust to a wide misspecification of that ratio. Through a series of Monte Carlo experiments we show that an easy-to-implement estimator produces estimates that are nearly unbiased for a wide range of the ratio of error variances. These MC analyses encompass linear and nonlinear specifications and also a system on nonlinear equations where all the variables are measured with errors