On Standard-Error-Decreasing Complementarity: Why Collinearity is Not the Whole Story

There is a widespread belief among economists that adding additional variables to a regression model causes higher standard errors. This note shows that, in general, this belief is unfounded and that the impact of adding variables on coefficients’ standard errors is unclear. The concept of standard-...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:MAGKS - Joint Discussion Paper Series in Economics (Band 03-2017)
Main Author: Hayo, Bernd
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Philipps-Universität Marburg 2017
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Online Access:PDF Full Text
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Summary:There is a widespread belief among economists that adding additional variables to a regression model causes higher standard errors. This note shows that, in general, this belief is unfounded and that the impact of adding variables on coefficients’ standard errors is unclear. The concept of standard-error-decreasing complementarity is introduced, which works against the collinearityinduced increase in standard errors. How standard-error-decreasing complementarity works is illustrated with the help of a nontechnical heuristic, and, using an example based on artificial data, it is shown that the outcome of popular econometric approaches can be potentially misleading.
Physical Description:18 Pages
ISSN:1867-3678
DOI:10.17192/es2024.0462