Hello i hope all of yopu have a great Evening at least in Germany it is,

I am researching for my Bachelors Thesis that tests for the effects of regulation on FDI (foreign direct investment). I am now ready with my my merging and cleaning up my data and can start to do the regression.
I came across this log file where somebody is testing the effects of regulation on international trade with a dstri data set and thats kinda similar to what i wanna do.

. ppmlhdfe rv_trade ind_dstri_exp ind_dstri_imp ln_DIST LANG CNTG CLNY ln_gdp_expln_gdp_imp
if rv_trade>0 & exporter!=importer & year=="2015", absorb(time)
cluster(pair_id)


Here i got some questions about some parts the command and what it does. I hope somebody can explain with the limited information you have. Maybe i can provide some more if needed.

As i understannd it the absorb command puts the time fixed effects in the regression,
I dont really know what the cluster command does (as i couldnt find the meaning of the pair_id variable), but it seemed to be important because i see it in every more complex regression.

second the exporter! =importer is completely new to me

I hope you can help me and thank you!!
Max