[Gretl-users] Fixed Effect crashed when I tried to include over 5000 entity dummies

Hi guys, I love gretl, but I have a problem. When I run the builtin fixed effect model on a panel data with over 5000 firms, the gretl does fine. But since the dependent variable has over 90% zeros, I tried to do a Tobit model with entity dummies (i.e. fixed effect tobit). Once I included over 5000 dummies using the gretl's GUI, gretl crashed with an error from the crash report: "Application Specific Information: detected buffer overflow”. I then ran a fixed effect tobit by gretlcli from the command line and it gets stuck for 3 days without much progress. Just now I tried to run a fixed effect by including entity dummies on OLS through GUI, it crashed gretl once again, with the same crash report. Next, I tried fixed effect by including du_* on the OLS command through gretlcli, it was able to complete in a few minutes, much longer than the builtin panel model with the —fixed-effects option. I’m a bit puzzled, however. If a panel fixed effect works fine, why can’t it work for a tobit model? Or it just will take a very long time to complete due to the nonlinearity? Is there a way to do the fixed effect like the builtin panel way rather than the explicit including dummies way on a tobit model? In either case, the buffer overflow should be looked at. Thanks in advance for all your help. Fred