Dealing with suppressed/ missing observation in panel data for a fixed effects model

[Sam Ashmore]

I am currently trying to undertake some FE analysis on the motality rates from opioids. However I have missing observations from one specific state (North Dakota) for 4 out of 11 years attempeted to be collected. what is the correct procedure to account for this ??

Thanks
Sam

[Andrew Musau]

The most common approach is to do nothing and proceed with what is known as an unbalanced panel. If you can obtain the data from a different source, that's great. Otherwise, if you have data for all other states over the entire 11-year period, missing 4 out of 11 years for one state is really not significant.