Solved – Fixed effects or random effects model

fixed-effects-modelrandom-effects-model

I am currently writing my Master's thesis in which I aim at two things:
1) I try to find out if there are efficiency differences between public, private and non-profit hospitals
2) If efficiency increased or deceresead after the introduction of a new payment system.

My dataset contains roughly 1500 hospitals for each of the 13 years. The panel is unbalanced. I estimated the efficiency scores using Data Envelopment analysis. Now I would like to do a regression with the efficiency score as the dependent and some external factors (including ownership form but also patient age, case severity, region etc.) as the independent variables.

I am a bit confused about which regression to use, as I am unsure about how to interpret the results of FE regression. Some of the hospitals changed ownership during the period that the data covered, but I am not interested in change of efficiency after the hospitals became public or private (or whatever) but I am, at first, generally interested in finding out about basic efficiency differences. That is why I am leaning towards random effects regression rather than fixed effects (I will use the cluster robust option in STATA).
In order to answer the second question, I created dummy variables for the time periods representing the old and the new payment system. Again, I am not sure which type of regression would be the adequate one.
I performed the robust Hausman test which spoke for fixed effects regression, however, I am not sure if fixed effects will lead to the answer that I am looking for.

I would very much appreciate some insights on this (sorry if this is a bit confusing, I can elaborate on my intentions, if necessary)! Thank you very much!

Best Answer

Choosing between RE and FE depends on your assumtions about the error term. FE tries to remove constant unobserved homogeneity, where as RE assume not unobserved factors and instead corrects for serial correlation.

Use RE only if you think that $cov(x_{itj},a_{i})=0$. Typically FE is a much more convincing, and the leading case for using RE is if a important variable is time constant - but then correlated random effects can be employed. If you willing to assume a very strict set of assumption, then you could use the hausman test to help you decide.

For an introduction to correlated random effects see this - *.pdf, from the master himself (Wooldridge).