A Practical Guide to Compact Infinite Dimensional Parameter Spaces∗ Joachim Freybergery Matthew A. Mastenz May 24, 2018 Abstract Compactness is a widely used assumption in econometrics. In this paper, we gather and re- view general compactness results for many commonly used parameter spaces in nonparametric estimation, and we provide several new results. We consider three kinds of functions: (1) func- tions with bounded domains which satisfy standard norm bounds, (2) functions with bounded domains which do not satisfy standard norm bounds, and (3) functions with unbounded do- mains. In all three cases we provide two kinds of results, compact embedding and closedness, which together allow one to show that parameter spaces defined by a k · ks-norm bound are compact under a norm k · kc. We illustrate how the choice of norms affects the parameter space, the strength of the conclusions, as well as other regularity conditions in two common settings: nonparametric mean regression and nonparametric instrumental variables estimation. JEL classification: C14, C26, C51 Keywords: Nonparametric Estimation, Sieve Estimation, Trimming, Nonparametric Instrumental Variables ∗This paper was presented at Duke, the 2015 Triangle Econometrics Conference, and the 2016 North American and China Summer Meetings of the Econometric Society. We thank audiences at those seminars as well as Bruce Hansen, Kengo Kato, Jack Porter, Yoshi Rai, and Andres Santos for helpful conversations and comments. We also thank the editor and the referees for thoughtful feedback which improved this paper. yDepartment of Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, William H. Sewell Social Science Building, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
[email protected] zCorresponding author.