st: spell to person/month

[Doerthe Gatermann <gatermann@wzb.eu>]

Dear all,

i have a spell-file and I want to have a panel-file. I could use  the 
–expand– command and do something like this:

gen length = (end – start) + 1
expand length
bysort persnr (n_job) : gen month = _n


But this causes some difficulties, because in my spellfile there are 
people with more than one job at the same time. When I use –expand- as 
shown above I produce too many rows. The second problem is: I need to 
generate new colums (dummy variables) to store the information of the 
beginning/end of first an second job and overlaps – please see illustration.

The spell-file:

persnr   spell  startmonth endmonth
 1       school    400       450
 1       job       451       460
 1       job       455       500


The person/month file I want to have:

pernr month school_1 job_1 job_2
  1    400     1      0     0
  1    401     1      0     0
  .
  .
  1    451     0      1     0
  1    452     0      1     0
  .
  .
  1    455     0      1     1
  1    456     0      1     1

Using –reshape wide– first (to get one row for one person) and then
–expand– is one way to get the datastructure I want, but it is laborius. 
Does anybody know a better way?


Thanks! Dorthe



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