Hello,

I am having trouble understanding what the difference is between xtreg with random effects and xtmixed? My data concerns how certain drug policy characteristics (5 dummy variables) affect cannabis consumption rates. I have arranged the data as a panel, where I have 8 observations (2006 to 2016) for about 20 different EU countries (although I have many missing observations). I had done my analysis using xtreg with random effects (to control for the repeated measures per country even thought I am not really assessing time as a variable) but today I came across multilevel models and using the mixed command with random intercepts. The result are quite similar but not the same. I tried xtreg, xtreg with mle at the end and xtmixed. I do not know which one to pick and why.