Why Adding Fixed Effects May Increase Bias

Posted in Statistics / Heterogeneity

Why adding (more) fixed effects is not a silver bullet for the problem of unobserved heterogeneity and 3 things you can do about it.

A common approach to controlling for unobserved heterogeneity is to run a linear regression with fixed effects. This post shows that this strategy may lead to strong bias in more realistic settings, even if you specify the fixed effects correctly. It is also about some things you can do about it.

How to Add a Progress Bar for Matlab parfor Loops

Posted in Simulations / Tools

An easy way to track progress in parallel for loops in Matlab

Running parallelized Monte Carlo simulations in Matlab is easy with parfor loops. But there’s a catch: how can you know how much of the work is done and how much is left?

This post is about an efficient and easy visual way to keep track of progress in parfor loop (and some less obvious Matlab features I learned about when trying to figure it out).