I started following the debate on differential minimum wage for youth (15-19 year old) and adults in New Zealand. Eric Crampton has written a nice series of blog posts, making the data from Statistics New Zealand available. I will use the nzunemployment.csv data file (with quarterly data from March 1986 to June 2011) and show an example of multiple linear regression with autocorrelated residuals in R.

A first approach could be to ignore autocorrelation and fit a linear model that attempts to predict youth unemployment with two explanatory variables: adult unemployment (continuous) and minimum wage rules (categorical: equal or different). This can be done using:

Remember that adult*minwage is expanded to adult + minwage + adult:minwage. We can make the coefficients easier to understand if we center adult unemployment on the mean of the first 80 quarters. Notice that we get the same slope, Adj-R2, etc. but now the intercept corresponds to the youth unemployment for the average adult unemployment before changing minimum wage rules. All additional analyses will use the centered version.

In the centered version, the intercept corresponds to youth unemployment when adult unemployment rate is 5.4 (average for the first 89 quarters). The coefficient of minwageEqual corresponds to the increase of youth unemployment (9.44%) when the law moved to have equal minimum wage for youth and adults. Notice that the slopes did not change at all.

I will use the function gls() from the nlme package (which comes by default with all R installations) to take into account the serial correlation. First we can fit a model equivalent to mod2, just to check that we get the same results.

Yes, they are identical. Notice that the model fitting is done using Restricted Maximum Likelihood (REML). Now we can add an autoregressive process of order 1 for the residuals and compare the two models:

There is a substantial improvement for the log likelihood (from -182 to -170). We can take into account the additional parameter (autocorrelation) that we are fitting by comparing AIC, which improved from 375.77 (-2*(-182.8861) + 2*5) to 368.52 (-2*(-170.5032) + 2*6). Remember that AIC is -2*logLikelihood + 2*number of parameters.

The file unemployment.txt contains the R code used in this post (I didn’t use the .R extension as WordPress complains).