A Simple Uniformly Valid Test for Inequalities

07/15/2019

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by   Gregory Cox, et al.

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We propose a new test for inequalities that is simple and uniformly valid. The test compares the likelihood ratio statistic to a chi-squared critical value, where the degrees of freedom is the rank of the active inequalities. This test requires no tuning parameters or simulations, and therefore is computationally fast, even with many inequalities. Further, it does not require an estimate of the number of binding or close-to-binding inequalities. To show that this test is uniformly valid, we establish a new bound on the probability of translations of cones under the multivariate normal distribution that may be of independent interest. The leading application of our test is inference in moment inequality models. We also consider testing affine inequalities in the multivariate normal model and testing nonlinear inequalities in general asymptotically normal models.