This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Kang, J.-h. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

The Usefulness and Uselessness of the Decomposition of Tobit Coefficients

University of Chicago, Illinois

McDonald and Moffitt's (1980) decomposition method for Tobit coefficients disaggregates the total changes in a censored outcome variable into the changes in the probability of attaining noncensored values and the changes in the noncensored values themselves. McDonald and Moffitt, however, did not highlight two limitations of this decomposition, and sociological applications of the Tobit decomposition that do not acknowledge these limitations have been misleading. First, the decomposition ratio of the two effects depends on the choice of an observation point in the sample. Some sociological studies invalidly generalized a decomposition at the mean point of the sample to the whole sample. Second, once the observation point is fixed, the decomposition ratio is the same across all coefficients or across all predictors. That is, the two effects remain proportionally constant, but studies often erroneously assume they differ across predictors. Further implications are discussed in relation to other selection bias models.

Key Words: Tobit • decomposition • methodology • selection model

Sociological Methods & Research, Vol. 35, No. 4, 572-582 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0049124106292359


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?