EViews.com

Dear all,

dealing with a truncated dependent variable, I run several tobit-regressions using Eviews 6.0. Fortunately, my results are robust against different starting values. To check that, I used several options to determine these values, starting with "Eviews Supplied" and then testing ".8 x Eviews", ".5 x Eviews" and Zero. However, I cannot really find additional information about the built-in algorithms behind "Eviews Supplied" which provide the starting values.

Could somebody please give me some information about these procedures? I would like to mention this in my paper and I'm therefore keen to provide some rough details.

THX!

Raupel

They're basically the OLS results for the equation with no correction for censoring, with the starting variance coefficient taken from the residual variance. An oft-mentioned alternative would be to take the regression on the truncated sample.

That said, I wouldn't view taking fractions of the default coefficients as particularly great way of showing robustness since all your comparisons lie on the same hyperplane.

Thx Glenn!