st: Dealing with panel data

[John Kenny <john.kenny27@mail.dcu.ie>]

Dear Statalist,

I'm relatively new to stata and I cannot find a standard way too solve
my problem and I may need to write a .*do file.

I'm dealing with a very large data set that has about 20 variable that
outlines horse racing results with 711,000 observations. The problem
that I am having is that I cannot get the mean of one variable
'overround' if two other variables are a certain value.

 To be more specific within the data set I am using the 'overround'
determines the bookmakers profit margin. What I want to do is get the
mean of the 'overround'  for each race from 2 to the last race 7 if
the 'favorite' (which is a dummy variable) won the first race. I have
a number of variables that outline the time of each race and when it
occurs at a certain meeting. These are some of the variables that are
outlined in the data set for each race there is a variable that says
were the race is held [ 'Meeting' ], the date and time, ['date',
'time'] , the odds given for each horse ['odds'], the race number at
that meeting ['race_no' (lists the races from 1-7)], whether the
favorite won that race ['favorite'] and the overround which is the
bookmakers profit [ 'overround' ].

What I have tried is using the summarize function and try and get the
mean of the 'overround' if 'race_no'==1 & 'favorite'==1. However every
combination of variables I tried using it always just got the mean of
the 'overround' for race 1 if the favourite won and not the mean of
the second race or third race if the favorite won the first race.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I have been stuck on this for a while.

Thanks in advance.

John
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