I am an economics student at the university of constance. During the last semester I leaned the use of the econometrics program gretl. Right now I am writing my Bachelor Thesis with this program and encountered a problem. I am using the Children of the Immigrants Longitudinal Study Dataset http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR20520.v2 When importing the Dataset in gretl the panel structure of the dataset is lost. When trying to impose a panel structure on the dataset the problem ist, that there is no variable measuring the period. Further, the Dataset is coded such that each observation is in one row and all variables are in columns. The problem is, that v1 to v148 are measured in period 1, v203 to p144 are measured in period 2 and v400 to v450 are measured in period 3. But I fail to define this periodicity such that a panel structure can be defined. I tried pretty much everything I could think of, and my supervising professor does not now gretl. The tutor who taught us gretl also has no solution for my problem. The last thing I can think of ist to export the Dataset as .csv file and include a timevariable manually. I hope that you can help me out with an easier way, as this method would be very time consuming.

From what I can tell, the ICPSR20520 dataset is not actually a panel,