Effective Nonparametric Estimation in the Case of Severely Discretized Data

Often economic data are discretized or rounded to some extent. This paper proposes a regression and a density estimator that work especially well when discretization causes conventional kernel based estimators to behave poorly. The estimator proposed here is a weighted average of neighboring frequency estimators, and the weights are composed of cubic B-splines. Interestingly, we show that this estimator can have both a smaller bias and variance than frequency estimators. As a means to obtain asymptotic normality and rates of convergence, we assume that the discreteness becomes finer as the sample size increases