Beyond the Oracle Property: Adaptive LASSO in Cointegrating Regressions

Abstract

This paper establishes new asymptotic results for the adaptive LASSO estimator in cointegrating regression models. We study model selection probabilities, estimator consistency, and limiting distributions under both standard and moving-parameter asymptotics. We also derive uniform convergence rates and the fastest local-to-zero rates that can still be detected by the estimator, complementing and extending the results of Lee, Shi, and Gao (2022, Journal of Econometrics, 229, 322--349). Our main findings include that under conservative tuning, the adaptive LASSO estimator is uniformly $T$-consistent and the cut-off rate for local-to-zero coefficients that can be detected by the procedure is $1/T$. Under consistent tuning, however, both rates are slower and depend on the tuning parameter. The theoretical results are complemented by a detailed simulation study showing that the finite-sample distribution of the adaptive LASSO estimator deviates substantially from what is suggested by the oracle property, whereas the limiting distributions derived under moving-parameter asymptotics provide much more accurate approximations. Finally, we show that our results also extend to models with local-to-unit-root regressors and to predictive regressions with unit-root predictors.