st: RE: A simple Stata Macro trick?!... I need your help please

[Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

I guess that you want 

foreach item in X Y {
	bysort ID (DATE): gen `item'5=`item'[_n+5]
}

as otherwise the groups defined by -ID DATE- will just be single observations. 

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

John Litfiba

I do not know what is wrong in the following code:

X and Y are variables in my database

foreach item in  "X" "Y" {
bysort ID DATE: gen `item'5=`item'[_n+5]
}

That is, I would like to use a loop over these 2 variables names X and
Y that would allow the creation of new numeric variables called "X5"
and "Y5" and whose value are lagged copies of existing variables X and
Y... (5 row later)
It seems that the new variable are created correctly, but Stata do not
understand that it must EVALUATE the variable stored in `item[_n+5] :
so I get a missing value instead of the numeric value stored at the
nth+5 row...


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