tsset Command throws the error : repeated time values in the panel

[Julia Sophie]

Hello everyone, I would like to do a VAR analysis. To do this, I first need to declare my panel data as a time series using the tsset command. Unfortunately, I keep getting the following error: repeated time values within panel.

tsset ID year, yearly

[Nick Cox]

This is an FAQ -- the main points of which are that Stata is always right on this and so you should hunt the duplicates --

https://www.stata.com/support/faqs/data-management/repeated-time-values/

and indeed there are duplicates

. duplicates list ID year

Duplicates in terms of ID year

  +-----------------+
  | Obs   ID   year |
  |-----------------|
  | 159    9   2017 |
  | 160    9   2017 |
  +-----------------+

although the other variables for those observation are not identical. A little sleuthing indicates that the identifiers are confused around

.

 groups ID country if inlist(ID, 8, 9)

  +-----------------------------------+
  | ID      country   Freq.   Percent |
  |-----------------------------------|
  |  8   Arab World      17     47.22 |
  |  9   Arab World       1      2.78 |
  |  9    Argentina      18     50.00 |
  +-----------------------------------+

i.e. one observation that should have ID 8 has ID 9. (The percents here are not informative. groups is from the Stata Journal.)

[Julia Sophie]

Thank you so much Nick! That solved my Problem :-)