I try to determine India’s fertility decline between 1991 and 2001 in a multivariate regression (OLS). I have used “total fertility rate” as dependent variable and estimate the effects from six explanatory variables (see example below).
I have two questions:
First, How should I compare the result between 1991 and 2001? Which is the best method? Shall I investigate “interaction effects”? Or maybe “fixed-effects” and “random-effects” (seems to be a little bit complicated)? Or is it enough to simply interpret the result for each year in each column and then compare differences and similarities?
Second, I would like to estimate regional effects. How shall I do this? Shall use dummy variables (like South dummy, North dummy, East dummy, West dummy). Or is a better method to use separate analysis? Which means four separate multivariate regressions for each year. Or shall I combine both methods?
Example of Multivariate regression Dependent variable: Total Fertilty Rate (standard error in parenthesis)
INDIA 1991 INDIA 2001
Poverty 0,014*** 0,015***
(0,003) (0,002)
Female literacy -0,015*** 0,0021***
(0,002) (0,007)