I am a law student researching which factors influence the CSR (corporate social responsibility, GSE_RAW
) behavior of companies. As my studies didn't offer any statistics courses, I'm having trouble to understand what type of statistical analysis I should perform on my data. After describing the data, I hope some of you can tell me more about this.
Two groups of possible factors / variables influencing CSR have been identified: company-specific and country-specific.
First, company-specific variables are
MKT_AVG_LN
: the marketvalue of the companySIGN
: the number of CSR treaties the company has signedINCID
: the number of reported CSR incidents the company has been involved in
Second, each of the 4,000 companies in the dataset is headquartered in one of 35 countries. For each country, I have gathered some country-specific data, among others:
LAW_FAM
: the legal family the countries' legal system stems from (either French, English, Scandinavian, or German)LAW_SR
: relative protection the countries' company law gives to shareholders (for instance, in case of company default)LAW_LE
: the relative effectiveness of the countries' legal system (higher value means more effective, thus for instance less corrupted)COM_CLA
: a measurement for the intensity of internal market competitionGCI_505
: mesurement for the quality of primary educationGCI_701
: measurement for the quality of secondary educationHOF_PDI
: power distance (higher value means more hierarchical society)HOF_LTO
: country time orientation (higher means more long-term orientation)DEP_AVG
: the countries' GDP per capitaCON_AVG
: the countries' average inflation over the 2008-2010 timeframe
In order to make an analysis on this data, I "raised" the country-level data to the company-level. For instance, if Belgium has a COM_CLA
value of 23, then all Belgian companies in the dataset have their COM_CLA
value set to 23. The variable LAW_FAM
is split up into 4 dummy variables (LAW_FRA
, LAW_SCA
, LAW_ENG
, LAW_GER
), giving each company a 1 for one of these dummies.
This all results in a dataset like this:
COMPANY MKT_AVG_LN ... INCID ... LAW_FRA LAW_SCA ... LAW_SR LAW_LE COM_CLA ... etc
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 1.54 55 0 1 34 65 53
2 1.44 16 0 1 34 65 53
3 0.11 2 0 1 34 65 53
4 0.38 12 1 0 18 40 27
5 1.98 114 1 0 18 40 27
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
4,000 0.87 9 0 1 5 14 18
Here, companies 1 to 3 are from the same country A, and 4 and 5 from country B.
My DV, GSE_RAW
is a numerical value for each companies' CSR behavior given by a rating agency.
- I believe the country-level variables are also called "categorical" variables, as many companies share the same value for these variables (in the example above, companies 1 to 3 all share the same values for
LAW_FRA
toCOM_CLA
). I believe to have found out that "categorical" variables are also known as fixed factors. Is all this true? - I believe an OLS regression analysis is not the proper model here because of the categorical (country-level) variables. It has been proposed to use "Generalized Linear Models" (GLS), using the country-level variables as (fixed?) "factors" and the company-level variables as "covariates". Is this correct? And as a subquestion: why exactly is OLS not appropriate because of the country-level variables? What is it what they do in the OLS calculations that makes them set off the regression?
[edit 1]
I am using SPSS for statistical analysis
[edit 2]
Here my attempt to create a GLM using this data. However, I am unable to not get the "you haven't specified a custom model" Do I have to select all 4 variables here (becaus I want a beta and significance level for all 4 of them to construct a regression model)? And if so, why do I have to do this twice? I already said in a previous dialogue box that DEP_AVG
and CON_AVG
are fixed factors and that SIGN
and INCID
are covariates. Why would I, for instance, insert INCID
here as a covariate, but not include it in the model building dialogue? Also, I really don't understand the output I'm getting, since it is very different from ordinary OLS output (the only output I'm slightly comfortable with).
- Am I now doing the right analysis?
- How can I get a regression model from this?