xtset: Set panel data properties

In briatte/qogdata: Functions to manipulate Quality of Government data and related material

Description

Function to specify the panel data properties of a data frame. The syntax is provided in the 'Details'. Intended for country-year cross-sectional time series (CSTS) data, but should fit any panel data format.

Usage

  xtset(dataset = NULL,
    data = c("ccode", "year", "ccodealp", "cname"),
    spec = c("iso3n", "year", "iso3c", "country.name"),
    type = "country",
    name = "Quality of Government, time series data",
    url = "http://www.qog.pol.gu.se/", quiet = FALSE)

Arguments

dataset	the panel data frame to set the attributes to.
data	the data parameters to pass to the data: unique identifier and time period, optionally followed by short and long observation names. Defaults to QOG country-year data settings. See 'Details'.
spec	the spec parameters to pass to the data: formats of unique identifier and time period, optionally followed by formats of short and long observation names. Defaults to QOG country-year data settings. See 'Details'.
type	the type of observations in the panel data. Defaults to "country", which will read the spec parameters as countrycode formats.
name	a description of the dataset.
url	a URI locator for the dataset (the website address).
quiet	whether to return some details. Defaults to FALSE (verbose).

Details

an xtdata attribute is a list of 5 to 11 panel data paramaters stored as character strings in the following named vectors:

• data, a vector of variable names coding for the unique identifier and time period, optionally followed by the variable names for the short and long observation names, as with alphabetical country codes and country names.

• spec, a vector of variable formats that match the data variables; this allows to store countrycode formats in the dataset and can theoretically work with any other format, like FIPS or households.

• type, a vector that defines the type of observations contained in the data; "country" is the only type that currently produces any specific behaviour from xtdata through the countrycode package, but "region" is on the way for working with NUTS codes, and it should be feasable to implement FIPS codes.

• name, an optional vector that defines the dataset name, which is printed on top of the function results.

• url, an optional vector that defines the URI locator for the data source (typically, the website address where to find codebooks, technical documentation and related publications).

These characteristics mimic some of the behaviour of the xtset and label data commands in Stata.

Value

a data frame with the xtdata attribute.

See Also

countrycode

Examples

# Load QOG demo datasets.
data(qog.demo)
# Set xtdata attribute on QOG time series.
QOG = xtset(qog.ts.demo)
# Set xtdata attribute on recent years.
QOG.200x = xtset(subset(qog.ts.demo, year > 1999))
# Manually set xtdata attribute for UDS dataset.
UDS = get_uds()
UDS = xtset(UDS,
            data = c("ccodecow", "year"),
            spec = c("cown", "year"),
            type = "country",
            name = "Unified Democracy Scores"
    )

briatte/qogdata documentation built on May 13, 2019, 7:43 a.m.