Check if a variable is time invariant in R - r

Question

I tried to search an answer to my question but I find the right answer for Stata (I am using R).
I am using a national survey to study which variables influence the investment in complementary pension (it is voluntary in my country).
The survey is conducted every two years and some individuals are interviewed more than one time. I filtered the df in order to have only the individuals present more than one time trought the filter command. This is an example from the original survey already filtered:
year id y.b sex income pens
2002 1 1950 F 100000 0
2002 2 1943 M 55000 1
2004 1 1950 F 88000 1
2004 2 1943 M 66000 1
2006 3 1966 M 12000 1
2008 3 1966 M 24000 1
2008 4 1972 F 33000 0
2010 4 1972 F 35000 0
where id is the individual, y.b is year of birth, pens is a dummy which takes value 1 if the individual invests in a complementary pension form.
I wanted to run a FE regression so I load the plm package and then I set the df like this:
df.p <- plm.data(df, c("id", "year")
After this command, I expected that constant variables were deleted but after running this regression:
pan1 <- plm (pens ~ woman + age + I(age^2) + high + medium + north + centre, model="within", effect = "individual", data=dd.p, na.action = na.omit)
(where woman is a variable which takes value 1 if the individual is a woman, high, medium refer to education level and north, centre to geographical regions) and after the command summary(pan1) the variable woman is still present.
At this point I think that there are some mistakes in the survey (for example sex was not insert correctly and so it wasn't the same for the same id), so I tried to find a way to check if for each id, sex is constant.
I tried this code but I am sure it is not correct:
df$x <- ifelse(df$id==df$id & df$sex==df$sex,1,0)
the basic idea shuold be like this:
df$x <- ifelse(df$id=="1" & df$sex=="F",1,0)
but I can't do it manually since the df is composed up to 40k observations.
If you know another way to check if a variable is constant in R I will be glad.
Thank you in advance

Answer 1

I think what you are trying to do is calculate the number of unique values of sex for each id. You are hoping it is 1, but any cases of 2 indicate a transcription error. The way to do this in R is
any(by(df$sex,df$id,function(x) length(unique(x))) > 1)
To break that down, the function length(unique(x)) tells you the number of different unique values in a vector. It's similar to levels for a factor (but not identical, since a factor can have levels not present).
The function by calculates the given function on each subset of df$sex according to df$id. In other words, it calculates length(unique(df$sex)) where df$id is 1, then 2, etc.
Lastly, any(... > 1) checks if any of the results are more than one. If they are, the result will be TRUE (and you can use which instead of any to find which ones). If everything is okay, the result will be FALSE.

Answer 2

We can try with dplyr
Example data:
df=data.frame(year=c(2002,2002,2004,2004,2006,2008,2008,2010),
id=c(1,2,1,2,3,3,4,4),
sex=c("F","M","M","M","M","M","F","F"))
Id 1 is both F and M
library(dplyr)
df%>%group_by(id)%>%summarise(sexes=length(unique(sex)))
# A tibble: 4 x 2
id sexes
<dbl> <int>
1 1 2
2 2 1
3 3 1
4 4 1
We can then filter:
df%>%group_by(id)%>%summarise(sexes=length(unique(sex)))%>%filter(sexes==2)
# A tibble: 1 x 2
id sexes
<dbl> <int>
1 1 2