Hi there,

I was hoping to get help regarding a change is signs of a coefficient when using fixed effects regressions vs random effects.

I am measuring changes in women's life satisfaction with partner's presence of a health condition as a control. The coefficient on this variable is positive when running fixed effect regressions. This seems odd, as one would assume that women living with a partner who has a health condition will reduce their overall life satisfaction. To try and determine whether this has something to do with correlation between other controls I removed them step by step. Still even if I regress something like this with no other controls including year dummies:

xtreg satisfaction partner_health_condition, fe robust
I get a positive coefficient on partner_health_condition. Though if I run something like this:

reg satisfaction partner_health_condition, robust
The coefficient on partner_health_condition is negative as expected. I am struggling to get my head around this. I have run a Hausman test and FE is the appropriate estimation method.
I know this is not to do with an error in my coding of the variables as I do not have this issue when running it on the male sample.

Your help would be greatly appreciated!