QLIM Procedure

Example 27.2 Tobit Analysis

(View the complete code for this example.)

The following statements show a subset of the Mroz (1987) data set. In these data, Hours is the number of hours the wife worked outside the household in a given year, Yrs_Ed is the years of education, and Yrs_Exp is the years of work experience. A Tobit model will be fit to the hours worked with years of education and experience as covariates.

By the nature of the data, it is clear that there are a number of women who committed some positive number of hours to outside work (y Subscript i Baseline greater-than 0 is observed). There are also a number of women who did not work at all (y Subscript i Baseline equals 0 is observed). This produces the model

y Subscript i Superscript asterisk Baseline equals bold x prime Subscript i Baseline bold-italic beta plus epsilon Subscript i
y Subscript i Baseline equals StartLayout Enlarged left-brace 1st Row 1st Column y Subscript i Superscript asterisk Baseline 2nd Column normal i normal f y Subscript i Superscript asterisk Baseline greater-than 0 2nd Row 1st Column 0 2nd Column normal i normal f y Subscript i Superscript asterisk Baseline less-than-or-equal-to 0 EndLayout

where epsilon Subscript i Baseline tilde normal i normal i normal d upper N left-parenthesis 0 comma sigma squared right-parenthesis. The set of explanatory variables is denoted by bold x Subscript i.

title1 'Estimating a Tobit Model';

data subset;
   input Hours Yrs_Ed Yrs_Exp @@;
datalines;
0 8 9 0 8 12 0 9 10 0 10 15 0 11 4 0 11 6
1000 12 1 1960 12 29 0 13 3 2100 13 36
3686 14 11 1920 14 38 0 15 14 1728 16 3
1568 16 19 1316 17 7 0 17 15
;
/*-- Tobit Model --*/
proc qlim data=subset;
   model hours = yrs_ed yrs_exp;
   endogenous hours ~ censored(lb=0);
run;

The output of the QLIM procedure is shown in Output 27.2.1.

Output 27.2.1: Tobit Analysis Results

Estimating a Tobit Model

The QLIM Procedure

Model Fit Summary
Number of Endogenous Variables1
Endogenous VariableHours
Number of Observations17
Log Likelihood-74.93700
Maximum Absolute Gradient1.18953E-6
Number of Iterations23
Optimization MethodQuasi-Newton
AIC157.87400
Schwarz Criterion161.20685

Parameter Estimates
ParameterDFEstimateStandard
Error
t ValueApprox
Pr > |t|
Intercept1-5598.29512927.692220-202.16<.0001
Yrs_Ed1373.12325453.9888776.91<.0001
Yrs_Exp163.33624736.5512991.730.0831
_Sigma11582.859635390.0764804.06<.0001


The "Parameter Estimates" table has four rows. The first three of these rows correspond to the vector estimate of the regression coefficients bold-italic beta. The last one is called _Sigma, which corresponds to the estimate of the error variance sigma.

Last updated: June 19, 2025