expand data at the beginning of the panel

[Pierre Dupuis]

Hi all,

I try to create new missing values in a dataset, in order to obtain the same time period for all my dataset; the goal is to merge them into a single dataset.
All my dataset are monthly between 1998m12-2019m6 for 28 countries except one, which is monthy but between 2002m1-2019m6. For this dataset, I want to create missing values for the period 1998m12-2002m1.


Here an example of the data:

clear
input float Date str14 Country double CreditNFC
504 "Austria"     .
505 "Austria"     .
506 "Austria"     .
507 "Austria"     .
508 "Austria"     .
509 "Austria"     .
510 "Austria"     .
511 "Austria"     .
512 "Austria"     .
513 "Austria"     .
514 "Austria"     .
515 "Austria"     .
516 "Austria"     .
517 "Austria"  -121
518 "Austria"   347
519 "Austria"  -633
520 "Austria"   211
521 "Austria"  1560
522 "Austria" -1678
523 "Austria"   250
524 "Austria"   164
525 "Austria" -1231
526 "Austria"  1642
527 "Austria"   -24
528 "Austria"  -462
529 "Austria"  -199
530 "Austria"   463
531 "Austria"    67
532 "Austria"   518
533 "Austria"   610
534 "Austria"  -712
535 "Austria"   284
536 "Austria"  1415
537 "Austria"   630
538 "Austria"   692

format Date %tm

The idea is to expand the time variable to 1998m12.
I'm not sure that it's the best way to adress this issue, but I can't see a better way to do it.



Thanks for your help

[Nick Cox]

If any dataset you’re including in the merge has Dec 1998 data then you’ll get the result I think you want. Prior surgery is pointless or redundant or both at once.