Binary quantile regression with local polynomial smoothing

Manski (1975, 1985) proposed the maximum score estimator for the binary choice model under a weak conditional median restriction that converges at the rate of n−1/3 and the standardized version has a nonstandard distribution. By imposing additional smoothness conditions, Horowitz (1992) proposed a smoothed maximum score estimator that often has large finite sample biases and is quite sensitive to the choice of smoothing parameter. In this paper we propose a novel framework that leads to a local polynomial smoothing based estimator. Our estimator possesses finite sample and asymptotic properties typically associated with the local polynomial regression. In addition, our local polynomial regression-based estimator can be extended to the panel data setting. Simulation results suggest that our estimators may offer significant improvement over the smoothed maximum score estimators.