The Discussion Papers series presents results from ongoing research projects and other research and analysis by SSB staff, intended for international journals or books. The views and conclusions in this document are those of the author(s).
In this paper we make a case for using panel data and fixed effects estimation in such analysis, instead of OLS estimation. The main argument is that fixed effects estimation addresses the problem of omitted variable bias in the identification. We demonstrate the use of panel data and fixed effects estimation by using large scale administrative register data on charitable donations, exploiting that the data can be turned into a panel dataset. The results suggest that the estimation technique matters – fixed effects estimates are smaller than OLS estimates.