Re: st: Addressing variables

[Maarten Buis <maartenlbuis@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 4:08 PM, Christopher Garlich wrote:
> I have tried that already and it just returns: "ambiguous abbreviation". I
> also tried it with a macro, namely:
> Local i i
> And when I then try "avg = rowmean(Lag1 - Lag`i')", STATA actually
> interprets it as lag"i", but not with value of variable i.
> So my problem persists, I'm not able to address the value of i.

Sounds to me like you haven't assigned values to the local macro i.
When Stata evaluates a statement like -Lag`i'- it replace `i' with its
contents. If no contents was specified it adds nothing and -Lag`i'-
evaluates to -Lag-, which in your case is an ambiguous abbreviation.
Assigning it the contents "i", which is what you did when typing
-local i i-, lead to -Lag`i'- to be evaluated as -Lagi-, which
apparently does not exist in your data. What you seem to want is:

local i = 5
egen avg = rowmean(Lag1 - Lag`i')

Hope this helps,
Maarten

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


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