Hi all,

Hi All,

I am carrying out research for my bachelor thesis looking at the effect of gin consumption on health outcomes, using a regional-level panel data set. I am using two measures of health for robustness: ARD (alcohol-related deaths) and BADSAH (bad self-assessed health). I am aware it is an extremely small dataset but that is due to its novelty.


When running fixed effects regression --> DV: ARD
Controlling for:
TEH - total expenditure on healthcare
GDHI - income
dbbinge - binge drinking behaviour

xtreg ARD consumpgin GDHI TEH dbbinge, fe cluster(region2)

Fixed-effects (within) regression Number of obs = 85
Group variable: region2 Number of groups = 10

R-sq: Obs per group:
within = 0.7920 min = 6
between = 0.9934 avg = 8.5
overall = 0.9066 max = 9

F(4,9) = 799.43
corr(u_i, Xb) = 0.9085 Prob > F = 0.0000

(Std. Err. adjusted for 10 clusters in region2)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Robust
ARD | Coef. Std. Err. t P>|t| [95% Conf. Interval]
---------------+----------------------------------------------------------------
consumpgin | -2.359009 1.911085 -1.23 0.248 -6.682183 1.964165
GDHI | .8595775 1.656665 0.52 0.616 -2.888059 4.607214
TEH | 23.39898 1.606058 14.57 0.000 19.76582 27.03213
dbbinge | 3.038557 1.332999 2.28 0.049 .0231037 6.054011
_cons | 1099.962 109.1143 10.08 0.000 853.1284 1346.796
---------------+----------------------------------------------------------------
sigma_u | 1671.7861
sigma_e | 155.96611
rho | .9913715 (fraction of variance due to u_i)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TEH is significantly correlated with alcohol-related deaths - which could suggest reverse causality, as it may be regions are spending more on healthcare due to an increased number of alcohol-related deaths.

Please, if possible, can I have some advice on how to test for this!

Many thanks,
Carys Wright