Broken or Fixed Effects?
We replicate eight influential papers to provide empirical evidence that, in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects, OLS with fixed effects (FE) is generally not a consistent estimator of the average treatment effect (ATE). We propose two alternative estimators that recover the ATE in the presence of group-specific heterogeneity. We document that heterogeneous treatment effects are common and the ATE is often statistically and economically different from the FE estimate. In all but one of our replications, there is statistically significant treatment effect heterogeneity and, in six, the ATEs are either economically or statistically different from the FE estimates.
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Copy CitationCharles E. Gibbons, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, and Michael B. Urbancic, "Broken or Fixed Effects?," NBER Working Paper 20342 (2014), https://doi.org/10.3386/w20342.Download Citation
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Published Versions
Gibbons Charles E. & Suárez Serrato Juan Carlos & Urbancic Michael B., 2019. "Broken or Fixed Effects?," Journal of Econometric Methods, De Gruyter, vol. 8(1), pages 1-12, January. citation courtesy of 
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