Re: st: Problem with merging 2 datasets

[Maarten buis <maartenbuis@yahoo.co.uk>]

--- On Mon, 14/6/10, Thomas Gericks wrote:
> I have a data set "A" containing economic data for each
> quarter between 1960 and 2010. Another data set "B" contains
> the quarterly results between 1960 and 2010 of 5 different
> companys.
> 
> From the manual for the command "merge" I conclude that I
> want to do merge A and B as a 1:m relationship.
> Unfortunately the dd.mm.yyyy dates in "A" (31.03.yyyy,
> 30.06.yyyy., 30.09.yyyy, 31.12.yyyy)
> are not compliant to the company dates which can be
> 27.02.yyyy instead of 31.03.yyyy. My solution is to replace
> all February dates with March, January and November with
> December, etc.

The solution would be to transform your date variable in such
a way that time is measured in quarter rather than days. This
is easily done using the -qofd()- function, see: 
-help dates_and_times- and the example below.

*------------ begin example --------------
tempfile a b
drop _all
set obs 2
gen double date = .
replace date = mdy(3,31,2010) in 1
replace date = mdy(6,30,2010) in 2
gen x1 = _n
gen long date2 = qofd(date)
save `a'

drop _all
set obs 2
gen double date = .
replace date = mdy(2,27,2010) in 1
replace date = mdy(5,26,2010) in 2
gen x1 = _n + 1
gen long date2 = qofd(date)
save `b'

merge 1:1 date2 using `a'

format date %td
format date2 %tq
list
*-------------- end example ----------------
(For more on examples I sent to the Statalist see: 
http://www.maartenbuis.nl/example_faq )

Hope this helps,
Maarten

--------------------------
Maarten L. Buis
Institut fuer Soziologie
Universitaet Tuebingen
Wilhelmstrasse 36
72074 Tuebingen
Germany

http://www.maartenbuis.nl
--------------------------


      

*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/