Report
Modeling the evolution of age and cohort effects in social research
Yang, Yang; Schulhofer-Wohl, Sam (2011)
This paper proposes a new way of modeling age, period, and cohort effects that improves substantively and methodologically on the conventional linear model. The linear model suffers from a well-known identification problem: If we assume an outcome of interest depends on the sum of an age effect, a period effect, and a cohort effect, then it is impossible to distinguish these three separate effects because, for any individual, birth year = current year ? age. Less well appreciated is that the model also suffers from a conceptual problem: It assumes that the influence of age is the same in all ...
Staff Report , Paper 461