R package alternative to plm for panel data

1
votes

I have been googling quite a lot and only found the plm package as a comprehensive package of tools for handling and analyzing panel data in R.

I am a novice in the field but will have to perform some analyses for my Master Thesis.

Do you have any other recommendations of R packages to handle panel data (observation size rather small with 1,000 to 50,000 observations, 20-30 vars)?

2
rpanel-dataplm
Even for smaller sample sizes you might want to try the option for faster model estimation: options("plm.fast" = TRUE) - Helix123
Thank you for the hint! Will check it out. Cheers, cork - corkinabottle

2 Answers

2
votes

There are many packages out there - my personal favourites that work especially well with large datasets:

  • fixest with it's main function feols (apparently the fastest - see here for an introduction)
  • lfe with it's main function felm (see here for an introduction)

Apart from those two, plm has many useful functions that you can use independent of which package you use for your actual estimation e.g. within().

1
votes

The (curated) CRAN Task View Econometrics has a section about panel data and lists a few packages: https://cran.r-project.org/view=Econometrics

plm is the most versatile. However, there are more packages and most of them aim at a specific class of models.