Problem with dealing in unbalanced data obtained from CMIE database

[Rajat Gupta]

Hello everyone! I am a new user here. I'm an undergrad studying in Goa.
I'm working to study and observe a pattern in R&D behavior of manufacturing MSMEs as defined by the govt. There are around 6900 companies and the time considered is 1992 to 2018.

The issue is that all the companies haven't been in existence throughout the time frame, but while downloading the data contains just empty rows for the missing years. When I load the data into Stata, it shows strongly balanced, even though I know it's not.

I can't understand how to work with this unbalanced data.

Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you!

[Phil Bromiley]

Welcome. For the most part, you can ignore the problem. If you care to, you can delete observations where all the variables are missing:

drop if x1==. & x2==.
or
drop if missing(x1,x2)

However, the main reason to do this would be to make the data set smaller. When Stata runs a regression or any other statistical analysis, it simply drops any observation that has missing data for any of the variables.