Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Interacting an independent variable with fixed effects

Dear Statalist members,

Thank you so much for reading this post and helping me answer my question! In short, my question is how I can run a regression in Stata which contains not only fixed effects, but also the interaction of an independent variable with the fixed effects. I will explain the details below.

I am trying to replicate a paper which examines how the stock price reaction to earnings (a.k.a. earnings response coefficient) changes after a certain regulation was introduced. It is a classic difference-in-differences design complicated by the fact that the variable of interest is not a stand-alone variable but the coefficient obtained from a regression.

Specifically, the earnings response coefficient is the "b1" coefficient in the regression below:
CAR i,t = b0 + b1* UE i,t + bm* Controls i,t + ei,t
where
CAR i,t is the stock return around earnings announcement, for company i and year-quarter t;
UE i,t is the earnings being announced, for company i and year-quarter t;
Controls i,t is a list of control variables.

The regression I am trying to run is specified as follows (Table 3 in the attached paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...300417#bib0026):
CAR= b0 + b1* UE*Post*Treat + b2* UE + b3* Treat + b4* Post + b5* Treat*Post + b6* UE*Post + b7* UE*Treat
+ bm* Controls + bn* UE*Controls + Year-quarter fixed effect + Industry fixed effect + UE*Year-quarter fixed effect + UE*Industry fixed effect


In Stata 14, I tried to run the following code:
reghdfe car ue_post_treat ue ue_treat ue_post controls ue_controls, ///
absorb(industry yearquarter ue_industry ue_yearquarter) vce (cluster announcement_date)


The regression ran, but "ue" was omitted due to collinearity. This is expected because "ue_industry" = ue*i.industry and "ue_yearquarter" = ue*yearquarter are obviously collinear with "ue". This brings me to my questions:

1. Is my regression correctly specified? The paper cited above mentioned that they included the "interactions of UE with year-quarter fixed effect and industry fixed effects" and Table 3 also shows "UE*fixed effects", but does that actually mean taking the product of the year-quarter (or industry) dummy and UE? I am really confused as that seems to inevitably result in collinearity problems.

2. Suppose my specifications are correct, how should I run this regression in Stata (or other softwares)? In the paper, none of variables were omitted due to collinearity, so it is definitely achievable. Is there any other command I should use to run this regression?

Again, thank you so much for your help, I truly appreciate any suggestions or reference to any post or paper that addresses a similar problem.



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