Bad control

[Shreya Jain]

My dependent variable is Edu_hypo.
it is defined as Edu_hypo= 1 if wife_edu> hus_edu, 0 otherwise.
So if I am looking at the determinants of Edu_hypo from the wife's side, controlling for wife's education herself would be a bad control? Or is it important to control for that variable?

[George Ford]

leave it out.

if hus_edu is a categorical variable, which I suspect it is, then the results will be odd. You'll get a coefficient of 1 for any level of education equal to or exceeding a hs education and no standard errors.

sysuse auto, clear

tab rep78
g drep78 = rep78>=4

reg drep78 i.rep78

[Shreya Jain]

So mine is something like this using your example where disp is edu_hypo and assume length is wife_edu and Displacement is hus_edu :
sysuse auto, clear
gen disp= (length>displacement)
logit disp length

it does come up with an output

[George Ford]

That is not what you are asking. The disp variable is

g disp = displacement>200
logit disp displacement

In any case, you are essentially regressing y on y.

[Shreya Jain]

Dear Sir,
Maybe I was not clear earlier, but my variable is

gen edu_hypo= (wife_edu>hus_edu)

where both of them are categorical variables that show the highest education level of wife (wife_edu) and husband (hus_edu).
I want to study the determinants of edu_hypo i.e. educational hypogamy where I am trying to understand why women are marrying down in terms of education,
So I wanted to know if I should have wive_edu as one of my control variables in my regression.

[George Ford]

Oh, I see. So the dummy is wife educ > husband educ.

I think it's ok to include it. You'd think that the condition is more easily satisfied the higher the education level of the wife. Including both education levels as regressors may be a problem.