I have some balanced panel data and want to include trend variable into my regression. However, I have 60 districts in 7 year time period and I am not sure how to include trend variable. Year variable is repetitive as expected and for 2005-2011. I am thinking about the following;
gen t = .
replace t = 1 if year==2005
replace t = 2 if year==2006
up to year 2011 and it gives me t
variable from 1 to 7, for 180 different panels in the data.
My question: is it OK to include trend variable as I described above or should I directly throw year
variable into regression?
Your variable t
is just
gen t = year - 2004
and can be obtained in one line as above. Your variable t
has one small advantage over year
: if you regress a variable on t
the intercept refers to values in 2003, which is a gain on referring to values in year
0, which is way outside the range of the data.