Zeros in non-negative data: can you multiply by 10^c, round, and then model as a count variable? Is there anything wrong with modeling zero-containing non-negative data by first multiplying it by 10^something, then rounding it, and then modeling it as poisson (or negative binomial)? 
In my case, I've got data on crop yields that includes complete crop failures, and response vs fitted plots (from OLS) show a lot of fitted values below zero.  Furthermore, the measurements are noisy, so I won't really be losing much information by rounding.  So multiplying, rounding, and modeling as a count variable seems attractive.
This is longitudinal data with fixed intercepts (to control for all stable covariates), so tobit is out because it also isn't robust to the incidental parameters problem.  Adding a small constant and then logging gives ugly residual plots.  Gamma is out because gamma regression also isn't robust to the incidental parameters problem, and I've got a lot of fixed intercepts.
I've come across this paper by Paul Allison which shows that poisson and negative binomial with fixed intercepts gives roughly consistent estimates of $\beta$, but that it has too-small SE's.
So, is there something wrong with multiplying data by 100, rounding and treating it as count?  Or are there better approaches?
Edit:  One idea that has come to me, but that nobody has recommended, is to use a Tweedie distribution, with software that estimates $p$.  But again it's not clear that this is robust to the incidental parameters problem.
 A: I would advise against this practice. Poisson distribution pretty much depends on the scale. Would you multiply by 10, 100, 1000, or 10000? Why? You will get different results when multiplying with different constats! See this simple example:
scale1 <- 5
scale2 <- 100
p1 <- rpois(99999, 100*scale1)/scale1
p2 <- rpois(99999, 100*scale2)/scale2
p2dens <- density(p2)

hist(p1, breaks = 20, freq = FALSE, ylim = range(p2dens$y))
lines(p2dens, col = "red")


You see that with different scales you get completely different distribution!
From this, I would think that poisson should be used for count data only. If you do use it anyway, you definitely need to handle overdispersion (you can try it and look at the residuals) and try different multiplying constants, but I think cleaner approach would be to do normal regression with log(y + c).
A: I can't recommend your proposal.  If $\mu_i$ is the expected value of data point $Y_i$ and $\sigma^2_i$ is its variance, then taking $\tilde Y_i = c Y_i$ gives you a new mean $c \mu_i$ and variance $c^2 \sigma^2_i$.  Under the Poisson model, $$\mu_i =\sigma^2_i,$$ hence your proposal is equivalent to assuming a fixed dispersion $c$ in a quasi-Poisson model, since $$c E(\tilde Y_i) =  \mbox{Var}(\tilde Y_i).$$  Unless you had good prior information about what $c$ should be, this would be hard to defend, compared to the typical approach for a quasi-Poisson model, which is to estimate $c$ through the mean of the squared Pearson residuals. (For example, R glm(..., family='quasipoisson')).  Another recommended approach would be to use a robust "sandwich" estimate.
In any case, your comment about ugly residuals suggests to me that you might have model mis-specification of your mean function $E(Y|X)$, because it is the specification of the mean function that determines what your residuals look like.  Assumptions on the mean-variance relationship (which, apart from the default, but non-intrinsic use of the $\log$ link function, is all that the Poisson model buys you) will only change the efficiency of your estimator and the validity of its estimated standard errors.  Fixes for mean-model mis-specification could include:


*

*Adding additional covariates (if you've got others measured)

*Including interactions or splines/polynomials of covariates

*Using a different link function

*Transforming $Y_i$ (eg Box-Cox transforms).


For the zero-inflation, you should look into both zero-inflated and zero-altered poisson/negative binomial distributions, available here (for R anyways.)  The difference between the two is that zero-inflated assumes that the failures are a mixture of the normal rate of zeros from the underlying distributions, plus an additional, special process that generates zeros, while the zero-altered distributions assume a two-part, sequential model, where an initial "hurdle" needs to be cleared before you get positive counts.
