xtsum and sum

[Daniel Mich]

Hello,

My question is very simple but I would appreciate some help nonetheless. I am analysing a panel data set and I used xtsum to get the descriptive statistics. The output is missing a median and the p25 and p75 values though so I used tabstat to get a look at those values too. I was wondering however, why I can not simply use the normal summarise command, since it gives me the exact same results for my variables. The within and between variation is missing of course, but the mean median and the quantiles are exactly the same. Is that correct or do I have to worry about a mistake in my data set? The fact that there is a special command for descriptive statistics for panel data made me curious about that.
Thank you for your help in advance!
Daniel

[Carlo Lazzaro]

Daniel:
as per -xtsum- helpfile (Description section):

xtsum, a generalization of summarize, reports means and standard deviations for panel data; it differs from summarize in that it decomposes the standard deviation into between and
within components.

[Daniel Mich]

Thanks for your reply!