Re: st: transform data from spell format into ordinary panel data

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

Stata is very, very good at these problems. Here is one way, and there
may be user-written programs or official commands that are even
quicker.

. input panelid spellid t1 t2

       panelid    spellid         t1         t2
  1. 1 1 502 503
  2. 1 2 504 604
  3. 2 1 502 555
  4. 2 2 556 600
  5. 2 3 601 604
  6. 3 1 550 553
  7. end

. gen nspell = t2 - t1 + 1

. expand nspell
(204 observations created)

. bysort panelid spellid : gen t = t1[1] + _n - 1

Nick
njcoxstata@gmail.com

On 15 August 2013 16:36,  Darjusch Tafreschi <altruist81@gmx.de> wrote:

> the title pretty much describes my problem:
>
> I have a data set that contains persons and their employment episodes in the following format which I'm used to call "spell format " (not sure if thats a common expression (?). It is structured as follows:
>
>
> Person-ID | Emploment-Episode-ID | start | end | Income | sector? | hrsperweek ...
>
> Any person can have multiple emploment spells, each with start, end, income, hoursperweek worked and a bunch of more variables. Moreover, the durations of the employment states can vary across and within persons.
>
> The date is not in a typical day-month-year format,  but represented by a number that represents the time elapsed since 1970/01/01.
>
>
> It looks like this then:
>
> 1 1 502 503 3.500 € public sector 42 hrsperweek
> 1 2 504 604 3.900 € public sector 42 hrsperweek
>
> 2 1 502 555 2.200 € private sector 20 hrsperweek
> 2 2 556 600 4.000 € private sector 42 hrsperweek
> 2 3 601 604 4.500 € private sector 40 hrsperweek
>
> 3 1 550 553 1.500 € self-employed 60 hrspwerweek
>
>
> I hope you can see that not necessarily the whole time period is covered, there can be gaps in which persons have been unemployed or studying or whatever.
>
> I would like to transform this data into something like a standard balanced panel dataset which gives me the state for every person in every month over the whole period (in this example the period 502-604). In particular it should look like this:
>
> Month | Person-ID | Emploment-Episode-ID | Income | sector? | hrsperweek ...
>
> In the end it shold be a HUGE data file looking like this:
>
> 502 1 1 ...
> 502 2 1 ...
> 502 3 -
> 503 1 1 ...
> 503 2 1 ...
> 503 3 -
> 504 1 2 ...
> 504 2 1 ...
> 504 3 -
>
> and so on.
>
>
> I looked into statas survival capabilities, but am not sure if those are really helpful here.
>
> Can anyone tell me how to approach my problem??

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