Long to wide

[starpen]

Hey guys.

I''ve finally gathered the last of the data I need to do some longitudinal research but then I hit a snag. As far as I know, my data is on long format and someone told me, that it needs to be in wide format. Now I just have one variable for year, one for country (dummy) and then a lot of economical variables. I've been reading on the reshape-command but I'm not quite getting it. I get that year somehow needs to be "merged" with the economical variables, but I'm a little lost.

Best
-Rolf

 

[bryangoodrich]

http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/modules/reshapew.htm

 

[bukharin]

I'm not sure what you're asking here. In any case most Stata commands and data manipulation tools work best when the dataset is in long format - especially for longitudinal analyses.

 

[starpen]

Yes, right? I've been reading the "Multilevel and Longitudinal Modeling Using Stata" and got the imrpession that long-format was quite fine for panel data but then when I met my professor-friend, he told me that it was only possible in wide. So long is okay?