  It is widely admitted that structured nonparametric modeling that circumvents
the curse of dimensionality is important in nonparametric estimation. In this
paper we show that the same holds for semi-parametric estimation. We argue that
estimation of the parametric component of a semi-parametric model can be
improved essentially when more structure is put into the nonparametric part of
the model. We illustrate this for the partially linear model, and investigate
efficiency gains when the nonparametric part of the model has an additive
structure. We present the semi-parametric Fisher information bound for
estimating the parametric part of the partially linear additive model and
provide semi-parametric efficient estimators for which we use a smooth
backfitting technique to deal with the additive nonparametric part. We also
present the finite sample performances of the proposed estimators and analyze
Boston housing data as an illustration.
