Hi Everybody,
I'm using a panel data (from year 2013 to 2020) about firms' R&D, sales, region of origin, industry etc.. I'm considering to use multilevel model regression is because there are region and industry, so the data structure is nested. The thing is that I have only three regions, which is too few to be used as a level, otherwise it will lead to large mean square estimation errors (Antonakis et al., 2021). But since I have 8 years, I wonder if it's possible to use yearXregion as one level and industry as the second level. Does it make sense to do that?

year Company region Industry RD Salesm
2013 THERMOFISHERSCIENTIFIC America HealthCareEquipment&Services 286.78124 9491.9153
2013 JDSUNIPHASE America TechnologyHardware&Equipment 214.63274 1215.938
2013 TWITTER America Software&ComputerServices 448.11255 482.11879
2013 CA America Software&ComputerServices 454.64434 3273.8743
2013 CISCOSYSTEMS America TechnologyHardware&Equipment 4563.8461 34183.164
2013 AGCO America IndustrialEngineering 256.25408 7821.6955
2013 STJUDEMEDICAL America HealthCareEquipment&Services 501.05142 3988.8334
2013 EMERSONELECTRIC America Electronic&ElectricalEquipment 417.6637 17887.753
2013 LOCKHEEDMARTIN America Aerospace&Defence 978.89931 32889.566