Methodological advice - obtaining panel data from census data: is it possible and how?

[Bruno Hoepers]

I'd like to ask members of Statalist for methodological advice.

I have found data on the spending with government ads by the Argentine state of Santa Fé. That's the data of my intended dependent variable. They uploaded the spending from 2007 to 2018 disaggregated by municipality. That's great.

The problem is the socio-economic data available to work with. The state of Santa Fé released the census data of 2001 and 2010 with data also disaggregated by municipality. The problem is that there is no data for the years 2002 to 2009 and beyond 2010.

I need data for the years of 2011 and 2015.

In this case, what can be done? What would you suggest? Linear interpolation and extrapolation of data? Some alternative technique?

Thank you

[Phil Bromiley]

This is really a substance problem more than a Stata problem.

Unless there is some other source of relevant data, interpolation and extrapolation are probably about as good as you can do. Whether this is good or bad obviously will depend on how smooth things are in those periods. I would worry a bit because most of the world had a recession in 2008/9 which would make interpolation problematic relative to a lot of economic data.

I am not expert at multiple imputation but I would suspect it wouldn't help you a whole lot given how few observations you actually have.

[Bruno Hoepers]

The two census data are the only data sources I have, Phil. I also got another suggestion today: to use 2010's data for analysis with 2011 and 2015 election data. Values on population, population density, and a few other socioeconomic stats would probably not change much for these two years.