Hello,

I am using a country variable, called "targetcountry" in my dynamic panel regression. This variable consists of 13 countries (long variables) and normally I should make 12 dummies (or use i.targetcountry) but this will give a big output with 12 different coefficients. As the coefficients are not important to my analysis and i just want to use the variable as control variable, I was asking myself how Stata treats the variable if just use "targetcountry" in the regression. Does it automatically makes dummy variables? and how could i intepret the coefficient? Is it possible to use a categorical variable like this in a regression?


My code looks as follows:

reghdfe Return returnLag1 targetcountry targetsector age Gearing lnsize style if vehiclestructure==1, a(yq) cl(vehiclenumber)

This gives the following output.
(1)
VARIABLES Closed-end
Appraisal-based return, t-1 0.1008***
(0.0346)
Target country -0.0006**
(0.0003)
Target sector -0.0005
(0.0004)
Age -0.0017***
(0.0003)
Gearing -0.0198**
(0.0079)
Ln Size 0.0063***
(0.0014)
Style 0.0030
(0.0027)
Constant -0.0833***
(0.0244)
Time FE Yes
Fund FE No
Observations 4,250
R-squared 0.1733
Many thanks in advance!