Unbalanced panel data

[Lorena Mita]

I want to balance an unbalanced panel dataset, without dropping out units with missing data. I read that one way is interpolation. Can you help me with the specific command? In some cases, in a time interval of 15 years for some units I have only 5 observation, is STATA able to estimate the missing data?

[Carlo Lazzaro]

Lorena:
welcome to this forum.
You can take a look at -ipolate-.
Stata can also -mi- (take a look at this Stata suite of commands in Stata .pdf manual) missing values, provided that some assumptions hold (for instance, data are not missing not at random). Unfortunately, it's up to you, not Stata, to investigate the mechanism and the pattern underlying the missingness of your data before deciding how to deal with it.
As an aside, pleease note that Stata can handle both balanced and unbalanced panels without any problem.