st: re: a stata question

Victoria replied

Both commands work well, except for in Kit's case, the newly generated
variable is a string (and therefore needs to be destrung afterwards),
and in Richard's case it's float.

If the variable is an ID code, leave it as string and encode it, if you're using it in some context where you want numeric values (e.g. xtset or tsset). Otherwise string ID codes are preferable in many cases.

Kit Baum, Boston College Economics and DIW Berlin
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata:
http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html

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