"Illegal Panel Structure X is nested within Y."

[felonx]

Dear all,

My name is Felix and I am very new to EViews. Sorry if my question is stupid; I also tried to search for old threads but didn't find anything that exactly matches my problem.

I am using EViews 8 (Student Version) on a Mac.

I have a sample of 63 merger transactions in different years. Every company in the sample makes only one acquisition during my time period of 10 years.

Now I'm trying to import my XLSX into EViews as a panel to control for firm and year fixed effects. The problem is that I don't understand which column to use as Cross Section ID Series when I try to create a Dated Panel. The Date Series is clear for me, this is the year (or the date) in which the merger takes place.

When I use, for example, an ID for each merger (integers from 1 to 63), I get an error message "Illegal panel structure DATEID is nested within ID." Please see attachment, where "ID" is the merger identifier and "DATE_ID"/"YEAR_ID" the date/year in which the merger takes place.

Could you please explain to me what I have to do to get my sample of mergers into a panel so that I can check for year/firm fixed effects? Thank you so much, sorry again if this question is easy to answer but I really don't understand how to do it.

Best,
Felix

sample_panel_per_year.xlsx

My data.

(92.54 KiB) Downloaded 447 times

Error message.

Screenshot 2014-05-31 12.58.42.png (10 KiB) Viewed 12434 times

[EViews Glenn]

A panel structure requires that there be more than one observation within each cross-section unit. The error message is indicating that there is only one YEAR within each of the cross-section units that you have specified. Another way of saying this is that you can't control for firm effects if your firm has only one observation.

You can create an undated panel to (strangely enough) check for year effects by making your YEAR the cross-section identifier. But it might be just as easy to read as an unstructured data set and to enter the year dummy variables yourself.

[felonx]

Thank you Glenn for your answer! It all makes much more sense now.

- Felix