Yes, agreed. Many thanks for the reference and the comments.
Vidya
>>> [email protected] 12/04/03 01:14pm >>>
You indicated later that you had solved 
the question of how to do this in Stata. 
Irrespective of that, the t test is based
on the assumption that observations 
are independent, which in most panel 
situations seems unlikely; otherwise,
your P-values are seriously inaccurate. 
That doesn't make analysis impossible, but it does mean 
that the autocorrelation is needed to 
interpret the t test properly. 
Among many other sources, Rupert G. 
Miller's "Beyond ANOVA" is good on 
this kind of problem. 
Nick 
[email protected] 
Vidya Mahambare
> I am having some problem using ttest. I have a panel data - 
> 10 time periods,
> 2000+ firms from 13 sectors and 3 ownership categories.
> I am interested in testing whether the means of a variable 
> (efficiency
> indicator) are different for the ownership pairs during a 
> particular time period
> for each sector.
> Eg; time = 1 to 4, ttest efficiency if owner =1 and owner 
> =3 for sector 1, then
> sector 2 and so on
> Time = 5 to 8, ttest efficiency if owner =1 and owner =3 
> for sector 1, then
> sector 2 and so on
> 
> Should I temporality drop observations in all sectors 
> except one and then do
> ttest? I have tried several different ways, but without success. 
> 
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