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Published March 2001 | public
Journal Article Open

Throwing Out the Baby With the Bath Water: A Comment on Green, Kim and Yoon

Abstract

Donald P. Green, Soo Yeon Kim, and David H. Yoon contribute to the literature on estimating pooled times-series cross-section models in international relations (IR). They argue that such models should be estimated with fixed effects when such effects are statistically necessary. While we obviously have no disagreement that sometimes fixed effects are appropriate, we show here that they are pernicious for IR time-series cross-section models with a binary dependent variable and that they are often problematic for IR models with a continuous dependent variable. In the binary case, this perniciousness is the result of many pairs of nations always being scored zero and hence having no impact on the parameter estimates; for example, many dyads never come into conflict. In the continuous case, fixed effects are problematic in the presence of the temporally stable regressors that are common IR applications, such as the dyadic democracy measures used by Green, Kim, and Yoon.

Additional Information

© 2001 by The IO Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published online: 09 July 2003. We thank Matt Baum for research assistance. Jonathan Katz thanks the John. M. Olin Foundation for a Faculty Fellowship supporting his research.

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