English

Unbiased Estimation of Central Moments in Unbalanced Two- and Three-Level Models

Econometrics 2026-04-01 v2

Abstract

This paper derives closed-form unbiased estimators of central moments in multilevel random-effects models with unbalanced group sizes. In a two-level model, we provide unbiased estimators for the second, third, and fourth central moments under both group-level and observation-level averaging. In a three-level model, we provide unbiased estimators for the second and third central moments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.03469,
  title  = {Unbiased Estimation of Central Moments in Unbalanced Two- and Three-Level Models},
  author = {Dan Ben-Moshe and David Genesove},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.03469},
  year   = {2026}
}