Network-Adjusted GMM Estimation under Network Uncertainty

This paper proposes a network-adjusted generalized method of moments (NA-GMM) estimator for social interaction models when the observed network may differ from the true interaction network. NA-GMM is a novel penalized GMM approach that allows the elements of the observed interaction matrix to be modified to improve the fit of the moment conditions. To avoid unrestricted network adjustments, the NA-GMM criterion introduces a penalty on the amount of adjustment. Since NA-GMM does not aim to estimate the true interaction network itself, the estimator generally converges to a pseudo-true parameter. For a linear spatial autoregressive model, we prove that the NA-GMM estimator is consistent for the pseudo-true parameter and is asymptotically normally distributed under general moment misspecification. We also prove that a fixed-weight version of the NA-GMM estimator has a desirable bias reduction property relative to conventional GMM without network adjustment. An empirical application to U.S. county-level COVID-19 infection data demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed method.