st: Range Merging

[Malcolm Wardlaw <malcolm@mail.utexas.edu>]

I wanted to pose this question to Statalist regarding matching data to a 
range of values instead of exact values.  I kind of asked this question 
before, but I realized from the response that my question was somewhat 
ill formed, so I'll try to be as explicit as possible.  I will use an 
example to illustrate the question.

Let's say I want to do a long-run event study on the changes in real 
growth of companies.  In order to do this, I need to appropriately match 
the company I am running the event study on to a group of comparable 
companies.  For this, I need a matched dataset of all companies that 
match in a range of accounting variables.

The match occurs as follows.  I have a data set (1) containing all of 
the companies I wish to perform the event study on.  I need to then 
create a dataset (2) that contains matching companies from a dataset of 
the larger Compustat universe of all firms (3).  To do this, I need to 
gather all firms that have the same SIC code, sales that are between 15% 
and -15% of the event company, and assets that are between 20% and -20% 
of the event company in the quarter of the event.  The new dataset must 
also have a marker for each of these group of sample firms that 
corresponds to the event firm.

Here is how I originally dealt with the problem. In the program, Stata 
is continually cycling through the data, loading part of another dataset 
into memory, appending it to another dataset from disk, saving that 
dataset to disk, and then reloading the original dataset from disk each 
time.  It works, but it seems very inefficient.

Is there a best practice on how to do this, or is this basically as good 
as it's going to get?

---------------------------------------
local num = _N
forval i = 1/`num' {
   /*The sales of Event Company i*/
   local sales=sales[`i']
   /*The quarter of the observation*/
   local qtr=eventquarter[`i']
   /*SIC code*/
   local sic=sic3[`i']
   /*Assets of the event company*/
   local assets=qassets
   /*A code that uniquely tags the event*/
   local code=code[`i']
   quietly:use compustat if  `qtr'=obsqtr & `sic'=sic3 & 
qsales<=1.15*`sales'/*
   */ & 
qsales>=.85*`sales'&qassets<=1.2*`assets'&qassets>=.85*`assets', clear
   gen code=`code'
   append using comparables
   quietly:save comparables,replace
   use events
}
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