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WORKING PAPER
Should I Use Fixed or Random Effects?
Clark, TomLinzer, Drew Abstract Empirical analyses in political science very commonly confront data that are grouped---multiple votes by individual legislators, multiple years in individual states, multiple conflicts during individual years, and so forth. Modeling these data presents a series of potential challenges, of which accounting for differences across the groups is perhaps the most well-known. Two widely-used methods are the use of either "fixed" or "random" effects models. However, how best to choose between these approaches remains unclear in the applied literature. We employ a series of simulation experiments to evaluate the relative performance of fixed and random effects estimators for varying types of datasets. We further investigate the commonly-used Hausman test, and demonstrate that it is neither a necessary nor sufficient statistic for deciding between fixed and random effects. We summarize the results into a typology of datasets to offer practical guidance to the applied researcher. Keywords Fixed effects multilevel Panel data Random effects simulation TSCS File
Uploaded 03-26-2012 Document ID Number 1315 |
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