L2-relaxation for Economic Prediction

We leverage an ensemble of many regressors, the number of which can exceed the sample size, for economic prediction. An underlying latent factor structure implies a dense regression model with highly correlated covariates. We propose the L2-relaxation method for estimating the regression coefficients and extrapolating the out-of-sample (OOS) outcomes. This framework can be applied to policy evaluation using the panel data approach (PDA), where we further establish inference for the average treat...