Nola,
if you tell us what your ultimate goal is, we might be able to provide
better advice. Your command only gives correct results if
a) your data is already sorted by year, and
b) there are no gaps in your variables.
A better version is
generate fdpop = d.pop
which will take care of those things automatically.
However, you can also use the d. operator in regressions, e.g.
regress yvar d.pop
without actually creating the variables. If you do want to create the
variables, use a loop (see -help forvalues-).
Eva
2009/3/16 Nola Agha <[email protected]>:
> Hi -
> I'd like to first difference all of the variables in my equation. I have a
> panel dataset which is -xtset dmaid year-. The following command seems to work
> quite well for one of my variables:
>
> by dmaid, sort: generate fdpop=pop[_n]-pop[_n-1]
>
> I'm wondering:
>
> a) if there is a built-in command to do this for an entire equation (as opposed
> to doing it variable by variable)?
>
> b) if not, if there is a way to automate this procedure for all of my (many)
> variables?
>
> Thanks,
> Nola
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