flowever a number of studies on the subject have raised questions in this regard with their authors arguing that hypothesizing a linear relationship between growth inequality and poverty can produce a misspecification that biases the estimates because these relationships may not in fact be linear in that case the ols estimates will tend to be biased and inconsistent overestimating the coefficient of that variable an effort can be made to correct this bias by using the fixed effects estimator withingroups which generates slightly smaller standard deviations of the coefficients