Hi all,
I just wanted to clear up a little uncertainty with many people about
whether they can replicate a paper with OLS. Please read point 4.2 of this:
http://gking.harvard.edu/papers/
The basic idea is that while we don't recommend replicating a paper which
uses mainly OLS, if you insist on doing it, your improvement must be
something more advanced. For example, if the authors used OLS on a binary
dependent variable, you can replicate it and use a logit model. All the
fancy add-ons to the OLS models (random effects, IV estimators, etc.) are
things that we probably will not cover and therefore you will have a hard
time improving on with any of our methods you will learn. The main point is
that unless you currently have a good idea about an improvement on an OLS
paper that uses something we learn in the class, we highly recommend not
replicating OLS.
--
Patrick Lam
Department of Government and Institute for Quantitative Social Science,
Harvard University
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~plam