Identification of mixtures of dynamic discrete choices

Abstract

This paper provides new identification results for finite mixtures of Markov processes. Our arguments yield identification from knowledge of the cross-sectional distribution of three (or more) effective time-series observations under simple conditions. We explain how our approach and results are different from those in previous work by Kasahara and Shimotsu (2009) and Hu and Shum (2012). Most notably, outside information, such as monotonicity restrictions that link conditional distributions to latent types, is not needed.