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The original authors did the same thing
Posted by droodman
on
10 May 2012 at 21:07 GMT
Given the concerns about Lu and colleagues' model choice, we repeated the analysis using an alternative statistical model to assess the robustness of the relationship between DAH and GHE-S. We used ordinary least squares regression with country fixed effects, clustered by country, for the main model estimation of the association between DAH and GHE-S. http://plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001214#article1.body1.sec3.p3
The implication here is that this alternative estimator is an innovation. But the original authors did it too: "To test the sensitivity of our findings from the ABBB model, we also used a fixed-effects model with robust SEs..." The only apparent difference is small: here the standard errors are clustered by country.