st: question about defining a local

[Daifeng He <dhe.statlist@gmail.com>]

Hi there,

This is driving me nuts, but I just cannot see what's going wrong with
my simple code.  Basically, I am defining a local to do sample
restriction so that I can quicky switch from one sample restriction to
another in my regressions.   Can anyboday tell me why my code below is
wrong?

. local state & st=="CA"

. di "`state'"
& st==CA"" invalid name
r(198);


But then this local is valid when I put it in a regression! (But I
cannot use this local as an argument in a sub-program which is called
by the main program. I am running many repeated sets of regressions so
it's much easier to put the set of regressions into a sub-program and
call the sub-program. The error message similar to the above. )

. xtreg `depvar' `indepvar' `ctr' i.year i.qtr   if keep6_all==1
`inrange' & capped==0  `state'  , i(id) fe

Fixed-effects (within) regression               Number of obs      =    173493
Group variable: id                              Number of groups   =      7025

R-sq:  within  = 0.0757                         Obs per group: min =        13
       between = 0.7942                                        avg =      24.7
       overall = 0.7349                                        max =        25

                                                F(15,166453)       =    909.48
corr(u_i, Xb)  = 0.7029                         Prob > F           =    0.0000

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    cenmcaid |      Coef.   Std. Err.      t    P>|t|     [95% Conf. Interval]
-------------+----------------------------------------------------------------
 qmavgz_post |    .729194   .2207647     3.30   0.001     .2964999    1.161888
      qmavgz |  -1.728832   .1877174    -9.21   0.000    -2.096754    -1.36091
        govt |   1.379419   .5905301     2.34   0.019     .2219923    2.536845
    nfprofit |   .5900255   .2484427     2.37   0.018     .1030833    1.076968
         llc |  -22.47875   12.24045    -1.84   0.066    -46.46976    1.512259
       lbeds |   .3015509   .0027418   109.98   0.000     .2961771    .3069247

(the rest of results supressed)



Thanks for your help!

Daifeng

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