Hi all. Hoping someone can help me figure out what is up with the
following problem.
I have a data set I've created with "fillin". It looks like the below.
patent str7 %9s
appyear float %9.0g
| patent appyear |
|-------------------|
1. | 3435154 1965 |
2. | 3435154 . |
3. | 3435154 . |
4. | 3435154 . |
5. | 3435154 . |
|-------------------|
757. | 3610838 1969 |
758. | 3610838 . |
759. | 3610838 . |
760. | 3610838 . |
761. | 3610838 . |
|-------------------|
Records 1 and 757 were the "original" records and I wish to repeat the
appyear value from each into all of the copies of each. I thought I
could do so with
bysort patent: egen maxappyear=max(appyear)
replace appyear=maxappyear
However, the egen statement generates 6027 missing entries,
corresponding to 287 unique patents. One of these is patent 3610838
(line 757 above). The patent in line 1, on the contrary, worked as
planned. The data now looks like this:
| patent appyear maxapp~r |
|------------------------------|
1. | 3435154 1965 1965 |
2. | 3435154 . 1965 |
3. | 3435154 . 1965 |
|------------------------------|
757. | 3610838 1969 . |
758. | 3610838 . . |
759. | 3610838 . . |
I can find nothing in common among the patents that are not working.
Trying the same routine with another variable and it works just fine.
Can anyone figure out what might be going on here or suggest an
alternative?
Thanks.
Glenn
Glenn Hoetker
Assistant Professor of Strategy
College of Business Administration
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
217-265-4081
[email protected]
"Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm."
Sir Winston Churchill
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