Lagged control variables

[Cla Tuor]

Hello all,

I have panel data for different European countries for the period 1995-2007. In my fixed effects regression, I want to include lagged control variables - more precisely, three-year lagged manufacturing share (mf_share).

Can I enter the 1992 value of mf_share in the 1995 row in Excel and then simply regress y on mf_share?

Thank you!

[Clyde Schechter]

You can, but you absolutely should not. In fact, unless you are just playing around with your data, you should never do any analysis in Excel. If you want other people to take your work seriously, it should come with a complete audit trail of every step. Excel leaves no such audit trails.

On top of that, what you want to do here is utterly simple in Stata:

xtset country year
regress y L3.mf_share

will regress Y on the third lag of mf_share.

Do read -help tsvarlist- for more information about Stata's time-series operators.