Many of the zeros could thus be by-products
of the researchers or even the companies using
the same figure as before, and/or of a practice
of reporting figures in rounded form. Thus at
least some very likely "should be" small positives or
small negatives.
In land use studies a certain country was widely
praised for holding its forest cover constant while
all around it were visibly losing cover year by
year. It turned out that in the absence of an
annual survey the people who should know were
just returning the last measurement available
in response to a request for the current figure.
Came a new survey, and an apparent enormous drop
in one year, and a post mortem on what on earth
had happened....
However, it could also be that zero here signals
poor data quality for certain companies, something
that might be checkable in other ways.
Nick
[email protected]
Francesca Gagliardi
> Thank you very much for your replies to my question. I
> apologise for not
> having specified better how my dependent variable has been
> obtained. It is
> just a growth rate of firms, calculated as (employees at time
> t - employees
> at time t-1)/employees at time t-1. I have 15678
> observations, of which
> 23.7% are negative values, 39.2% are zeros and the remaining
> are positive values
>
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