st: group classification

[Jurgen Sidgman <sidgman@uwm.edu>]

Hi all,

I have what I thought it was a simple problem but has turned out to be a head age. I have a dataset of company names and transaction dates. What I need to do with it is as follows:
For each company, at the end of every april of each year, I want to verify that in the prior six months the company has at least one transaction. If the company has a transaction between november of the prior year and April of the current year I code it with a 1. If the company does not have a transaction within that period, regardless of having transactions in other months (lets say september) I code it with a 0.

I keep getting false positives because I have companies that have transactions in lets' say november and december of last year, no transactions on this year, and again transactions in january of next year. Then, what i get is that i am able to set to one last year and the next year, but I get a zero on the current year, which is not appropriate.

My code follows
. use "dataset.dta", clear
. drop if month(transdate) >= 5 & month(transdate) <= 10
. drop if month(transdate) < 11 & year(transdate) == 2004
. drop if month(transdate) > 4 & year(transdate) == 2008
. save "cross_section.dta", replace
. gen transyear = year(transdate)
. Keep compname transyear
. duplicates drop
. gen prior6 = 1
. snapshot save, label("Snapshot 1")

. use "dataset.dta", clear
. drop if month(transdate) < 11 & year(transdate) == 2004
. drop if month(transdate) > 4 & year(transdate) == 2008
. gen transyear = year(transdate)
. save "cross_section.dta", replace

. merge 1:m cusip form4 transyear using "cross_section.dta"

Obviously merging using the year in the key does not work, but I am out of ideas for the moment. Can anyone help?

Thank you!
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