# Coal and the Conservatives

Interesting election results in the UK over the weekend, where the Conservatives romped to victory. This was despite a widespread consensus that neither the Conservative or Labour party would get a majority. This was a triumph for uncertainty and random error over the deterministic, as none of the statistical forecasts appeared to deem such a decisive victory probable. The UK election is a lot harder to model, for numerous reasons, when compared to the US.

This means that a lot of pollsters and political forecasters will have to go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate their methods. Obviously, the models used to forecast the 2015 election could not handle the dynamics of the British electorate. However, there is a high degree of persistence within electuary constituencies. Let’s explore this persistence by looking at the relationship between coal and % Conservative (Tory) votes.

Following a tweet by Vaughan Roderick and using the methodology of Fernihough and O’Rourke (2014), I matched each of the constituencies to Britain’s coalfields creating a “proximity to coal” measure. What the plot below shows is striking. Being located on or in close proximity to a coal field reduces the tory vote share by about 20%. When we control (linearly) for latitude and longitude coordinates, this association decreases in strength, but not by much. For me, this plot highlights a long-standing relationship between Britain’s industrial revolution, the urban working class, and labour/union movement. What I find interesting is that this relationship has persisted despite de-industrialization and the movement away from large-scale manufacturing industry.

```> summary(lm(tory~coal,city))

Call:
lm(formula = tory ~ coal, data = city)

Residuals:
Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max
-42.507 -10.494   2.242  10.781  29.074

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept)  42.9492     0.7459   57.58   <2e-16 ***
coal        -24.9704     1.8887  -13.22   <2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 14.36 on 630 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.2172,	Adjusted R-squared:  0.216
F-statistic: 174.8 on 1 and 630 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

# robust to lat-long?
> summary(lm(tory~coal+longitude+latitude,city))

Call:
lm(formula = tory ~ coal + longitude + latitude, data = city)

Residuals:
Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max
-44.495  -8.269   1.485   9.316  28.911

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 246.4355    18.9430  13.009  < 2e-16 ***
coal        -15.1616     1.8697  -8.109 2.68e-15 ***
longitude     1.4023     0.4015   3.493 0.000512 ***
latitude     -3.8621     0.3651 -10.578  < 2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 12.76 on 628 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.3838,	Adjusted R-squared:  0.3809
F-statistic: 130.4 on 3 and 628 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

```

# Linear Models with Multiple Fixed Effects

Estimating a least squares linear regression model with fixed effects is a common task in applied econometrics, especially with panel data. For example, one might have a panel of countries and want to control for fixed country factors. In this case the researcher will effectively include this fixed identifier as a factor variable, and then proceed to estimate the model that includes as many dummy variables (minus one if an intercept is included in the modelling equation) as there are countries. Obviously, this approach is computationally problematic when there are many fixed factors. In our simple example, an extra country will add an extra column to the $X$ matrix used in the least squares calculation.

Fortunately, there are a number of data transformations that can be used in this panel setting. These include demeaning each within unit observation, using first differences, or including the group means as additional explanatory variables (as suggested by (Mundlak 1978)). However, these approaches only work well when there is one factor that the researcher wants to include fixed effects to account for.

Simen Gaure offers a solution this problem that allows for multiple fixed effects without resorting to a computationally burdensome methodology. Essentially the solution involves an elaboration of the group demeaning transformation mentioned in the above. More technical details can be found here or by referring to Gaure’s forthcoming article in Computational Statistics & Data Analysis. Those interested in implementing this estimation strategy in R can use the lfe package available on CRAN.

In the below, I have included a simple example of how the package works. In this example, the model needs to be set up to calculate fixed effects for two factor variables. Obviously, adding 2,000 columns to the data frame is not a convenient way to estimate the model that includes fixed effects for both the x2 and x3 variables. However, the felm function tackles this problem with ease. Stata has a similar function to feml, areg, although the areg function only allows for absorbed fixed effects in one variable.

```# clear workspace
rm(list=ls())
library(lfe)

# create data frame
x1 <- rnorm(10000)
x2 <- rep(1:1000,10)
x3 <- rep(1:1000,10)
e1 <- sin(x2) + 0.02*x3^2 + rnorm(10000)
y <- 10 + 2.5*x1 + (e1-mean(e1))
dat <- data.frame(x1,x2,x3,y)

# simple lm
lm(y~x1)
# lm with fixed effects
felm(dat\$y ~ dat\$x1 + G(dat\$x2) + G(dat\$x3))

##############################################
# output
##############################################
# simple lm
> lm(y~x1)
Call: lm(formula = y ~ x1)
Coefficients:
(Intercept)           x1
10.47       -36.95
> # lm with fixed effects
> felm(dat\$y ~ dat\$x1 + G(dat\$x2) + G(dat\$x3))
dat\$x1
2.501
```