st: Tobit interpretation and post estimation

["Elena Giarda" <elena.giarda@prometeia.it>]

Dear Statalisters,



We estimated a tobit model for the household debt (only consumer debt, no 
mortgages) as a function of several explicative variables, among which age, 
age-squared, income, income-squared, wealth, wealth-squared and some 
socio-economic dummy variables.



We decided to estimate a tobit model because of censoring: among our 
households (about 6500), 3373 have positive consumer debt, the remaining are 
censored at zero.



All variables are significant and of the right sign.



Our problem is how to predict the estimated values. In fact, if we use 
"predict" or "predict, ystar(min,max)" we obtain very small values of 
household debt (both using levels and logs of the dependent variable), 
possibly caused by a large negative estimated constant.



We are not sure whether we are using the "predict" command properly.



Does any of you have any suggestions on how to obtain predicted values in a 
tobit model?



Thank you very much for your help!



Best regards,

Elena and Cristiana



Elena Giarda
Prometeia - Associazione per le Previsioni Econometriche
Via G. Marconi, 43
40122 Bologna
Italy

e-mail : elena.giarda@prometeia.it
phone : +39 051 6480911 (switchboard)
phone : +39 051 6480475 (direct)
fax : +39 051 220753

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