Perfect!!! This is even better than fooling around with egen
concatenate( ) etc.
I was practically doing this in a far more complicated way using
excel. I never thought I'd actually use that _merge column.
Thanks Phil.
Kiron
On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Phil Schumm <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Nov 22, 2008, at 4:12 PM, Kir1 wrote:
>>
>> Perhaps the subject line is not the best one to address my problem, but
>> here it is:
>>
>> My original data set is of the 'long' format like this
>>
>> gvkey year revenue
>> 1000 1999 111
>> 1000 2000 222
>> .
>> .
>> 1001 1999 888
>>
>> From this I want to retrieve only one value of revenue per 'gvkey' which
>> corresponds to a year value that i lookup in a different database. So if in
>> the other data base my gvkey is 1000 and lookupyear is 2000, then only 222
>> should be in the revenue cell of the final database.
>
>
> The simplest way to handle this is to merge the two datasets by gvkey and
> year, and then just keep those observations for which _merge==3. For
> example, assuming that the variables in your other dataset are named gvkey
> and lookupyear, you would do
>
>
> gen lookupyear = year
> merge gvkey lookupyear using <other dataset name>, sort
> keep if _merge==3
>
>
> This will leave you with what you want.
>
>
> -- Phil
>
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