Some properties of tests for parameters that can be arbitrarily close to being unidentified

Confidence intervals for parameters that can be arbitrarily close to being unidentified are unbounded with positive probability [e.g. Dufour, J.-M., 1997. Some impossibility theorems in econometrics with applications to instrumental variables and dynamic models. Econometrica 65, 1365-1388; Pfanzagl, J. 1998. The nonexistence of confidence sets for discontinuous functionals. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference 75, 9-20], and the asymptotic risks of their estimators are unbounded [Potscher, B.M., 2002. Lower risk bounds and properties of confidence sets for ill-posed estimation problems with applications to spectral density and persistence estimation, unit roots, and estimation of long memory parameters. Econometrica 70, 1035-1065]. We extend these "impossibility results" and show that all tests of size alpha concerning parameters that can be arbitrarily close to being unidentified have power that can be as small as alpha for any sample size even if the null and the alternative hypotheses are not adjacent. The results are proved for a very general framework that contains commonly used models. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.