st: Oaxaca decomposition

[Vaidyanathan Ganapathy <vaidyang@usc.edu>]

I am using the -Oaxaca command in STATA to perform a decomposition of
ln(healthcare costs) on various predictors to study the differentials
between two groups. I have two related questions:

1) When I use ln(healthcare costs) as the outcome, the differentials
obtained are differences in ln(healthcare costs). I have read the
Oaxaca help file, but couldn't see if there is a way that the
explained and unexplained differences can be retransformed and
interpreted in real dollars (i.e. retransformed from ln(costs) to
costs)? Has anyone got any suggestion how to do this?

2) The Oaxaca estimation command doesn't seem to work with xtreg
(Error: "xtreg is not available with suest"); Does this mean that
fixed effects models cannot be run using this command? Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Vicky
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