Re: st: xtabond

["Brian P. Poi" <bpoi@stata.com>]

Yesterday Jing wrote:

...

> I want to have arellano-bond estimator in my panel data analysis. I know
> the xtabond does the job, but, when I used it in my stata programming, it
> always gave me the wrong message. For example:
>
> . tsset prov time;
>        panel variable:  prov (unbalanced)
>         time variable:  time, 1978 to 1998, but with gaps
>
> . xtabond g_lypcc pop100cr a_pol inst, lags(2);
> timevar (time) may not contain missing values when option full is specified
> r(451);
>
> I have no idea what's wrong and what I shold try next. Could you please
> help me to figure it out? Your help would be highly appreciated!

Jing is apparently using Stata 9.  The error message is being produced 
because the time variable contains one or more missing values.  Typically,
when a panel dataset is unbalanced, the time variable records the times 
for which observations do exist, and there is no observation at all in the 
dataset for a time for which data is missing.

In Jing's case, the time variable actually contains missing values, and I 
would recommend first loo
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