Re: st: Reshape issue

[James Bernard <jamesstatalist@gmail.com>]

Hi Nick and Richards,

Thanks for the suggestion.

Just to close the loop so that others who find our conversation on
statalist can benefit from this:

I used -collapse- plus -firstnm- which collapses the observations by
group to the first non-missing observation.


Regards,
James


On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 5:37 PM, Richard Williams
<richardwilliams.ndu@gmail.com> wrote:
> So, if I understand you correctly, with each additional year of data
> you added both another record for each firm and another variable
> (instead of just doing one or the other)? If so, how about something
> like (I am using pseudo code here)
>
> If not missing sales1990 then
>    Year = 1990
>     Sales = sales1990
>
> Repeat for each year in your data. You will then have a data set that
> has firm, year and sales (along with a lot of old variables you no
> longer want) and you will just need to xtset it.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Feb 27, 2013, at 4:12 AM, James Bernard <jamesstatalist@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Dear list members,
>>
>> I was trying to reshape my dataset from wide to long, and realized
>> that the the identifier of each case has to be unique. The problem is
>> actually with the shape of my data-set. I cannot use -duplicates drop-
>> to do teh job due to the nature of my dataset which looks like this:
>>
>>
>>   Firm          sales_1990        sales_1991        sales_1992
>> --------------    --------------------     ------------------
>> -----------------------
>> ABC                10                      missing              missing
>> ABC                 missing              23                     missing
>> ABC                  missing            missing                15
>> CDF
>> .
>> .
>> .
>> GFP
>>
>>
>> it is panel data so the same thing goes for CDF and GFP
>>
>> As you can see, I cannot make the cases unique.
>>
>> Is there any way out of this quagmire?
>>
>> I was thinking about finding a command that can make the sales in each
>> year being repeated for each firm. Then I could use _duplicates drop-
>> command.
>>
>> I appreciate your help!
>>
>> Thanks,
>> James
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