Adaptive Centering with Random Effects: An Alternative to the Fixed Effects Model for Studying Time-Varying Treatments in School Settings

Stephen W. Raudenbush ()
Additional contact information
Stephen W. Raudenbush: Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

Education Finance and Policy, 2009, vol. 4, issue 4, 468-491

Abstract: Fixed effects models are often useful in longitudinal studies when the goal is to assess the impact of teacher or school characteristics on student learning. In this article, I introduce an alternative procedure: adaptive centering with random effects. I show that this procedure can replicate the fixed effects analysis while offering several comparative advantages: the incorporation into standard errors of multiple levels of clustering; the modeling of heterogeneity of treatment effects; the estimation of effects of treatments at multiple levels; and computational simplicity. After illustrating these ideas in a simple setting, the article formulates a general linear model with adaptive centering and random effects and derives efficient estimates and standard errors. The results apply to studies that have an arbitrary number of nested and cross-classified factors such as time, students, classrooms, schools, districts, or states. © 2009 American Education Finance Association

Keywords: fixed effects models; adaptive centering; time-varying treatments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/edfp.2009.4.4.468 (application/pdf)
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:edfpol:v:4:y:2009:i:4:p:468-491

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1557-3060

Access Statistics for this article

Education Finance and Policy is currently edited by Stephanie Riegg Cellini and Randall Reback

More articles in Education Finance and Policy from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().