pdAllBalanced#

Purpose#

Checks if a panel dataset is strongly balanced and returns 1 if balanced, 0 otherwise.

Format#

isBalanced = pdAllBalanced(df[, groupvar, datevar])#
Parameters:

  • df (Dataframe) – Contains long-form panel data with \(N_i x T_i\) rows and K columns.

  • groupvar (String) – Optional, specifies the name of the variable used to identify group membership for panel observations. Defaults to the first categorical or string variable in the dataframe.

  • datevar (String) – Optional, specifies the name of the variable used to identify dates for panel observations. Defaults to the first date variable in the dataframe.

Returns:

isBalanced (Scalar) – Indicates if the panel dataset is balanced. Returns 1 if balanced, 0 otherwise.

Examples#

If your group variable is the first categorical variable in your dataframe and the date variable is a GAUSS date variable and not just a numeric column, you can just pass in the panel dataframe and GAUSS will locate the group and date variables for you.

// Import data
fname = getGAUSSHome("examples/pd_ab.gdat");
pd_ab = loadd(fname);

// Take a small sample for the example
pd_smpl = pd_ab[1:4 8:11,.];

// Print our sample
print pd_smpl;

id        year        emp       wage
 1  1977-01-01     5.0410    13.1516
 1  1978-01-01     5.6000    12.3018
 1  1979-01-01     5.0150    12.8395
 1  1980-01-01     4.7150    13.8039
 2  1977-01-01    71.3190    14.7909
 2  1978-01-01    70.6430    14.1036
 2  1979-01-01    70.9180    14.9534
 2  1980-01-01    72.0310    15.4910

// Check to see if the panel is balanced
is_balanced = pdallbalanced(pd_smpl);

print is_balanced;

The above code will return:

1.000

Remarks#

This function takes long-form panel data. To transform wide data to long-form data see dfLonger().

This function assumes panel is sorted by group and date. Note that panel data can be sorted using pdSort().

A strongly balanced panel dataset contains the same time points for each group. pdAllBalanced() examines the provided dataset to determine if it meets this condition.

  • If groupvar is not provided, the function defaults to the first categorical or string variable in the dataframe.

  • If datevar is not provided, the function defaults to the first date variable in the dataframe.

For datasets that are not strongly balanced, pdAllBalanced() returns 0.

See also:

See also

pdSummary(), pdSize()

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