Hello!

I am currently writing my master thesis on the implementation of GSCMP on financial performance. To evaluate the effect on financial performance one year later I want to lag my independent variable with one year. However, I only want to include observations that have at least two year of consecutive data available, I used the command indicated below. My initial dataset contains 8508 observations over a 10 year time period (2006-2015). I was wondering how to treat these 1436 generated missing values when doing my regression analyses, should I delete them or what is regular procedure when creating lagged variables?

. xtset ID year
panel variable: ID (unbalanced)
time variable: year, 2006 to 2015, but with gaps
delta: 1 unit

. by ID: gen L1 = GSCMP[_n-1] if year==year[_n-1]+1
(1436 missing values generated)

thank you in advance