  Penalized estimation principle is fundamental to high-dimensional problems.
In the literature, it has been extensively and successfully applied to various
models with only structural parameters. As a contrast, in this paper, we apply
this penalization principle to a linear regression model with a
finite-dimensional vector of structural parameters and a high-dimensional
vector of sparse incidental parameters. For the estimators of the structural
parameters, we derive their consistency and asymptotic normality, which reveals
an oracle property. However, the penalized estimators for the incidental
parameters possess only partial selection consistency but not consistency. This
is an interesting partial consistency phenomenon: the structural parameters are
consistently estimated while the incidental ones cannot. For the structural
parameters, also considered is an alternative two-step penalized estimator,
which has fewer possible asymptotic distributions and thus is more suitable for
statistical inferences. We further extend the methods and results to the case
where the dimension of the structural parameter vector diverges with but slower
than the sample size. A data-driven approach for selecting a penalty
regularization parameter is provided. The finite-sample performance of the
penalized estimators for the structural parameters is evaluated by simulations
and a real data set is analyzed.
