st: merge/joinby wityh if condition

[Kit Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

1) joinby is rarely the answer to a question. It is a quite  
specialised tool corresponding to the outer join in database lingo.  
It will not help you here; it would combine each obs on id (first ds)  
with each obs on id (second ds) leading to observations belonging to  
two people.

2) If you have single records in each database per id, it is a  
straightforward one-to-one merge on the id field.

3) After merging you may apply the if condition to the result with

keep if start_date1<=start_date2 & end_date1>=end_date2

to screen out those observations not wanted.

Kit Baum, Boston College Economics
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html


On Aug 13, 2005, at 2:33 AM, Taavi wrote:


> Dataset 1 has variables:
> id start_date1 end_date1 sum1
>
> Dataset 2 has variables:
> id start_date2 end_date2 sum2
>
> I need to join/merge these files by variable id and a condition:
> start_date1<=start_date2 & end_date1>=end_date2
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