EViews.com

Good evening,

Thanks for this great forum and i hope i can find the appropriate help here because im struggling for several weeks now to get this task done
Im trying to explain the determinants of dividend policy for a group of 42 firms within the period 1996-2007 and i need your help setting the panel equation using eviews. The model i want to estimate is the following
Yit = C1it TOTALEQUITYit + C2it SOCIALCAPITALit + µit
where Yit = DIVIDENDit - INCOMEit
I followed the 2nd post steps described in this topic http://forums.eviews.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=74 to make my data looks like a panel but next, when i try to generate the variable Y i get a "Numeric operator applied to string data" error message and im pretty sure that my data is in dot format and not comma. By the way, in the workfile and for almost all the variables, eviews doesn't seems to recognize my data as time series. That means instead of having the time series icon :series: infront of each variable i have an abc icon. Can someone shed some lights on this please?

Regards.

It sounds like EViews is reading in your data as character data, not numerical data.

Without seeing your data its hard to explain why this is.

Thanks for replying Gareth and i want to say that i appreciate the effort you're doing here to provide the right support for the eviews users. keep up the good work man.

Well for my issue i think figured it out. the problem was that i transformed all the cells with commas to dot ones in Excel before importing my data into eviews but i found that you have to leave them as they are (with commas) and let the program manage the transformation and it worked great. i was confused because judging by the example you gave in the tutorial, the data appears to be in dots not in commas. Thanks anyway.
one last question please. In case i want to define a lagged variable for the panel that is dDIIVIDEND = DIVIDEND - DIVIDEND(-1) how can i proceed because eviews keeps telling me that this is an illegal command. isn't this the right command for differentiating series or is it different for panel data?

Regards

Not sure I understand your question at all.

First of all, taking a lag of a variable is not differentiating, its differencing. That aside, you're possibly missing the series declaration:

series dDIVIDEND = DIVIDEND - DIVIDEND(-1)