st: Hodrick-Prescott Filter issues

[Christopher Hartwell <chartwel16@gmail.com>]

Having used stata on and off for 16 years (I still have stata 5 on floppy disk, although I'm currently running 11/IC), ths program never fails to amaze me. But I have a problem with HP filters that I'm hoping someone can help me with.

I have a time-series pooled dataset, 91 countries from 1989-2010, with several financial variables. In particular, I want to run the series on bank credit through the HP filter to get a sense of trend deviation in bank credit over this time frame. However, I keep running into several problems:

1.	I originally had an issue with missing data. I created a new variable called bankcred1 and then dropped all missing variables.
2. 	Once I did that, I sorted by country and attempted by country: hprescott bankcred1, stub (smooth) lambda (6.25). I received an error message telling me that my data had gaps and thus it wouldn't work.

However, I can't figure out where the gaps are. I've tsset-ed my data by country year, yearly...

I ran tsreport bankcred1 and got an unbroken list of observations but it claimed that every panel change was a gap (and every country was a different panel). 

How can I 
a) identify the "gap"
b) close it so stata knows that it's continuous (such as making the dataset one panel?)
c) get all of the HP filters into one variable?

I've never used HP on stata, I've done it on eViews because I found it more intuitive but for a database of this size that I need serious time-series computing power on, I need stata but am stymied on where the problems are.

Thanks,

Christopher Hartwell, PhD

Sent from my iPad
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