st: Fixed effects/hausman-test/ different approach?

["Ben Ammar" <Ben-Ammar@gmx.de>]

Hi everyone,

I know that my question is primarily of statistical nature but if anyone has an idea how to implement the solution in Stata, I would be very grateful.
The problem is namely the following: Right now I'm analyzing different firms and I want to check whether women or men are doing a better job. I have a panel data set and I use fixed effects for each firm (xtreg,fe). However, different firms have some sort of policy to employ rather women or men and as soon as I'm using fixed effects this performance-difference between men and women is absorbed and no significant difference remains. If I use a pooled regression and OLS or even random effects the difference remains. Statistically, I already could prove that firms have that sort of policy. However, I wondered if there's a way of combining that insight instead of doing first the fixed effects model and then saying: "Oh, by the way, firms rather employ women or men and that's why fixed effects doesn't show any signifance in the explanatory variable anymore." Most disturbing is that Stata or rather the Hausman-test suggests that I should use the fixed-effects which makes my argumen
 tation pretty much two-faced.

Does anyone have an idea to make the argumentation much more clear-cut and how to implement it in Stata or do you think that the argumentation as it is, is evident enough?

Thanks very much for your help!!
Ben
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