Switching this from users to devel. On Tue, 29 Jun 2010, Allin Cottrell wrote: Some more thoughts on this. By "behave differently" above I mean this: (A). When you do smpl <startobs> <endobs> this always replaces any previous sample setting that was done in the same way; and it always compounds (and never replaces) sub-sampling done via --restrict. This may sound a bit awkward but in fact I'm pretty sure it's the most intuitive behavior. (B). When you use --restrict with smpl it compounds any sample limitation that's already in place, unless you also give the --replace option. In effect, the two sampling modes are nested. Use of --restrict carves out a subset of the data, and "smpl <startobs> <endobs>" operates relative to the current subset. So to achieve what you're talking about for panel data in such a way that it's consistent with what happens with non-panel data (and not confusingly inconsistent!), we'd need to emulate the non-panel behavior of "smpl <startobs> <endobs>" quite exactly. I guess this may be doable, but it won't be very easy. Allin