Clustered standard errors with texreg? - r

Question

I'm trying to reproduce this stata example and move from stargazer to texreg. The data is available here.
To run the regression and get the se I run this code:
library(readstata13)
library(sandwich)
cluster_se <- function(model_result, data, cluster){
model_variables <- intersect(colnames(data), c(colnames(model_result$model), cluster))
model_rows <- as.integer(rownames(model_result$model))
data <- data[model_rows, model_variables]
cl <- data[[cluster]]
M <- length(unique(cl))
N <- nrow(data)
K <- model_result$rank
dfc <- (M/(M-1))*((N-1)/(N-K))
uj <- apply(estfun(model_result), 2, function(x) tapply(x, cl, sum));
vcovCL <- dfc*sandwich(model_result, meat=crossprod(uj)/N)
sqrt(diag(vcovCL))
}
elemapi2 <- read.dta13(file = 'elemapi2.dta')
lm1 <- lm(formula = api00 ~ acs_k3 + acs_46 + full + enroll, data = elemapi2)
se.lm1 <- cluster_se(model_result = lm1, data = elemapi2, cluster = "dnum")
stargazer::stargazer(lm1, type = "text", style = "aer", se = list(se.lm1))
==========================================================
api00
----------------------------------------------------------
acs_k3 6.954
(6.901)
acs_46 5.966**
(2.531)
full 4.668***
(0.703)
enroll -0.106**
(0.043)
Constant -5.200
(121.786)
Observations 395
R2 0.385
Adjusted R2 0.379
Residual Std. Error 112.198 (df = 390)
F Statistic 61.006*** (df = 4; 390)
----------------------------------------------------------
Notes: ***Significant at the 1 percent level.
**Significant at the 5 percent level.
*Significant at the 10 percent level.
texreg produces this:
texreg::screenreg(lm1, override.se=list(se.lm1))
========================
Model 1
------------------------
(Intercept) -5.20
(121.79)
acs_k3 6.95
(6.90)
acs_46 5.97 ***
(2.53)
full 4.67 ***
(0.70)
enroll -0.11 ***
(0.04)
------------------------
R^2 0.38
Adj. R^2 0.38
Num. obs. 395
RMSE 112.20
========================
How can I fix the p-values?

Answer 1

Robust Standard Errors with texreg are easy: just pass the coeftest directly!
This has become much easier since the question was last answered: it appears you can now just pass the coeftest with the desired variance-covariance matrix directly. Downside: you lose the goodness of fit statistics (such as R^2 and number of observations), but depending on your needs, this may not be a big problem
How to include robust standard errors with texreg
> screenreg(list(reg1, coeftest(reg1,vcov = vcovHC(reg1, 'HC1'))),
custom.model.names = c('Standard Standard Errors', 'Robust Standard Errors'))
=============================================================
Standard Standard Errors Robust Standard Errors
-------------------------------------------------------------
(Intercept) -192.89 *** -192.89 *
(55.59) (75.38)
x 2.84 ** 2.84 **
(0.96) (1.04)
-------------------------------------------------------------
R^2 0.08
Adj. R^2 0.07
Num. obs. 100
RMSE 275.88
=============================================================
*** p < 0.001, ** p < 0.01, * p < 0.05
To generate this example, I created a dataframe with heteroscedasticity, see below for full runnable sample code:
require(sandwich);
require(texreg);
set.seed(1234)
df <- data.frame(x = 1:100);
df$y <- 1 + 0.5*df$x + 5*100:1*rnorm(100)
reg1 <- lm(y ~ x, data = df)

Answer 2

First, notice that your usage of as.integer is dangerous and likely to cause problems once you use data with non-numeric rownames. For instance, using the built-in dataset mtcars whose rownames consist of car names, your function will coerce all rownames to NA, and your function will not work.
To your actual question, you can provide custom p-values to texreg, which means that you need to compute the corresponding p-values. To achieve this, you could compute the variance-covariance matrix, compute the test-statistics, and then compute the p-value manually, or you just compute the variance-covariance matrix and supply it to e.g. coeftest. Then you can extract the standard errors and p-values from there. Since I am unwilling to download any data, I use the mtcars-data for the following:
library(sandwich)
library(lmtest)
library(texreg)
cluster_se <- function(model_result, data, cluster){
model_variables <- intersect(colnames(data), c(colnames(model_result$model), cluster))
model_rows <- rownames(model_result$model) # changed to be able to work with mtcars, not tested with other data
data <- data[model_rows, model_variables]
cl <- data[[cluster]]
M <- length(unique(cl))
N <- nrow(data)
K <- model_result$rank
dfc <- (M/(M-1))*((N-1)/(N-K))
uj <- apply(estfun(model_result), 2, function(x) tapply(x, cl, sum));
vcovCL <- dfc*sandwich(model_result, meat=crossprod(uj)/N)
}
lm1 <- lm(formula = mpg ~ cyl + disp, data = mtcars)
vcov.lm1 <- cluster_se(model_result = lm1, data = mtcars, cluster = "carb")
standard.errors <- coeftest(lm1, vcov. = vcov.lm1)[,2]
p.values <- coeftest(lm1, vcov. = vcov.lm1)[,4]
texreg::screenreg(lm1, override.se=standard.errors, override.p = p.values)
And just for completeness sake, let's do it manually:
t.stats <- abs(coefficients(lm1) / sqrt(diag(vcov.lm1)))
t.stats
(Intercept) cyl disp
38.681699 5.365107 3.745143
These are your t-statistics using the cluster-robust standard errors. The degree of freedom is stored in lm1$df.residual, and using the built in functions for the t-distribution (see e.g. ?pt), we get:
manual.p <- 2*pt(-t.stats, df=lm1$df.residual)
manual.p
(Intercept) cyl disp
1.648628e-26 9.197470e-06 7.954759e-04
Here, pt is the distribution function, and we want to compute the probability of observing a statistic at least as extreme as the one we observe. Since we testing two-sided and it is a symmetric density, we first take the left extreme using the negative value, and then double it. This is identical to using 2*(1-pt(t.stats, df=lm1$df.residual)). Now, just to check that this yields the same result as before:
all.equal(p.values, manual.p)
[1] TRUE