Re: st: Keep longest consecutive streak in panels

[Daniel Lawson <dlawson1@nd.edu>]

On Jan 13, 2005, at 2:56 PM, LACHENMAIER wrote:
> I have an unbalanced panel data set of firms. For some firms there are
> data completely missing for some years. So there are gaps existing at
> the beginning, at the end and also somewhere in the middle of the time
> frame.
> What I want to do now, is to keep only those observations for each firm
> which are part of the longest consecutive streak of existing entries.

This was discussed last fall on this list, and a question that arose 
then applies to your question also: what would you want done in the 
case where a firm has two streaks of equal length?

Example:
Obs  Firm  year
1     1    1981
2     1    1980
3     1    1985
4     1    1986

Daniel Lawson

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