For More Stars, Use XTREG Instead of AREG

I have a secret to share: I'm not sure that I ever realized (or thought much about the fact) that areg and xtreg produce different standard errors. Well, they do, and I have some good news: Often times, the right thing to do is the thing that produces the smaller standard errors! See Fiona Burlig's blog entry for more details.

I really like that she thought through the issue using simulations. Sometimes we spend hours googling answers to our questions when writing a quick little dofile would not only answer the question, but also help us really understand the question.

So, go back to that old project with the insignificant results. Did you use areg or xtreg? If you were to increase the sample size, would you necessarily increase the number of clusters?




Update: Forget xtreg!! Just use reghdfe, like the blog entry suggests! One of my colleagues just reminded me, "It gets the standard errors right, allows for two-way clustering and multiple high dimension fixed effects, and even does IV estimation."  

Life of a Researcher: "I Will Survive"

Fabulous remake of an old classic created by Tavneet Suri's very talented RAs. Enjoy! And remember: Make those scatter plots!

Cool Data Alert: Health Inequality Project

I saw these graphs on the relationship between household income and life expectancy a few years ago and was blown away. Yes, the difference in life expediencies between the richest and poorest men in the U.S. (15 years!) is startling, but what was more surprising (for lack of a better word) to me is that there are such noticeable differences in the middle of the distribution--where I am, where my friends and family are, where you are. I would love to learn more about what is driving these differences. Is it something that you can buy with money? Can it all be explained by good behaviors that happen to be correlated with income? Just plain genetics?

Luckily, the Health Inequality Project team has made really cool data available to help us learn more. UConn graduate students, if you are interested in using these data and need an adviser/committee member, come find me.