1 Introduction

This workshop will take a practical look at panel data methods and models. Political scientists often approach research questions which have important time and space implications. Policy makers might face choices and questions of a similar nature: what effect does the building of a polluting power plant have on house prices? Is education a helpful tool to reduce the gender wage gap?

Panel data are useful to test hypotheses in these contexts, but come with new methodological and substantive challenges. Together we will look at these topics:

  • Panel data, what does it look like? How do we describe our samples?
  • Adapting Ordinary Least Squares to estimate models using panel data (especially focusing on the challenges of controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, errors, and lagged variables)
  • Implementation of the models in R
  • Substantive interpretation of model results from a practical policy-making point of view.

Last Updated: May 25, 2017 10:57 AM