sbtscs {stevemisc}

Create "peace years" or "spells" by cross-sectional unit

Description

sbtscs() allows you to create spells ("peace years" in the international conflict context) between observations of some event. This will allow the researcher to better model temporal dependence in binary time-series cross-section ("BTSCS") models.

Usage

sbtscs(data, event, tvar, csunit, pad_ts = FALSE)

Arguments

data

the data set with which you are working

event

some event (0, 1) for which you want spells or peace years

tvar

the time variable (e.g. a year)

csunit

the cross-sectional unit (likely a dyad if you're doing boilerplate international conflict stuff)

pad_ts

should time-series be filled when panels are unbalanced/have gaps? Defaults to FALSE.

Details

I should confess outright, and it should be obvious to anyone who looks at the code, that I liberally copy from Dave Armstrong's btscs() function in the DAMisc package. I offer two such improvements. One, the btscs() function chokes when a large number of cross-sectional units have no recorded "event." I don't know why this happens but it does. Further, "tidying" up the code by leaning on dplyr substantially speeds up computation. Incidentally, this concerns the same cross-sectional units with no recorded events that can choke the btscs() function in large numbers.

Value

sbtscs() takes a data frame and returns the data frame with a new variable named spell.

Author(s)

David A. Armstrong, Steven V. Miller

References

Armstrong, Dave. 2016. “DAMisc: Dave Armstrong's Miscellaneous Functions.” R package version 1.4-3.

Miller, Steven V. 2017. “Quickly Create Peace Years for BTSCS Models with sbtscs in stevemisc.” http://svmiller.com/blog/2017/06/quickly-create-peace-years-for-btscs-models-with-stevemisc/

Examples

## Not run: 
library(dplyr)
library(stevemisc)
data(usa_mids)

# notice: no quotes
sbtscs(usa_mids, midongoing, year, dyad)

## End(Not run)