<p>I hope you all are doing well.</p>
<p>I am doing my research using panel data.</p>
<p>In my dataset, almost 150 firms are being examined across 2014 - 2018, but only 321 observations were collected. What is worse is a lot of the firms (almost 20%) in the dataset only have a single observation across the five years.</p>
<p>Would it be possible to exclude the observations that appear only one time in the data set? Is there any reference for me to get some insights as to how to manage the single observations? Looking forward to your reply.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-10-06T04:20:47.140Z
It would be helpful to say what research question you have... what you're trying to do with this data.
Art
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-10-08T04:34:02.637Z
Hi Art, I am working on my research using extremely unbalanced panel data. My research question is to look for specific relationships between companies in the different tiers of supply chains and other moderating effects. However, as specified in the main question, my panel data set is highly unbalanced because some firms only have one or two or three observations during the period of investigation (2014-2018). I hope this additional detail helps.
Sean Park
<paneldata><data>
Q about Panel data with single observation units
Sean Park
# Q about Panel data with single observation units

(Asked by: username_0 on 2023-09-25)

I hope you all are doing well.

I am doing my research using panel data.

In my dataset, almost 150 firms are being examined across 2014 - 2018, but only 321 observations were collected. What is worse is a lot of the firms (almost 20%) in the dataset only have a single observation across the five years.

Would it be possible to exclude the observations that appear only one time in the data set? Is there any reference for me to get some insights as to how to manage the single observations? Looking forward to your reply.

**Tags:** paneldata, data

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: It would be helpful to say what research question you have... what you're trying to do with this data.  
> **username_0**: Hi Art, I am working on my research using extremely unbalanced panel data. My research question is to look for specific relationships between companies in the different tiers of supply chains and other moderating effects. However, as specified in the main question, my panel data set is highly unbalanced because some firms only have one or two or three observations during the period of investigation (2014-2018). I hope this additional detail helps.  

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