Overidentified two-stage least square (TSLS) is commonly adopted by applied economists to address endogeneity. Though it potentially gives more efficient or informative estimate, overidentification comes with a cost. The bias of TSLS is severe when the number of instruments is large. Hence, Jackknife Instrumental Variable Estimator (JIVE) has been proposed to reduce bias of overidentified TSLS. A conventional heuristic rule to assess the performance of TSLS and JIVE is approximate bias. This paper formalizes this concept and applies the new definition of approximate bias to three classes of estimators that bridge between OLS, TSLS and a variant of JIVE, namely, JIVE1. Three new approximately unbiased estimators are proposed. They are called AUK, TSJI1 and UOJIVE. Interestingly, a previously proposed approximately unbiased estimator UIJIVE can be viewed as a special case of UOJIVE. While UIJIVE is approximately unbiased asymptotically, UOJIVE is approximately unbiased even in finite sample. Moreover, UOJIVE estimates parameters for both endogenous and control variables whereas UIJIVE only estimates the parameter of the endogenous variables. TSJI1 and UOJIVE are consistent and asymptotically normal under fixed number of instruments. They are also consistent under many-instrument asymptotics. This paper characterizes a series of moment existence conditions to establish all asymptotic results. In addition, the new estimators demonstrate good performances with simulated and empirical datasets.PDF: Bridging OLS, TSLS and JIVE1.pdf
