st: variable to enumerate children panel dataset

["Prado De Castro Alfaiate, Jorge" <jprado@essex.ac.uk>]

Dear statalisters,

I am trying to generate a variable for child enumeration in a family.

I have a panel where the same child appears several times with different ages. This makes things harder.

The code below, which is the closest I could get to my objective, still fails to do what I want.

g chilenum=0
labe variable chilenum "children enumeration"
by family: replace chilenum=1 if age<=18 & child==1
by family: replace chilenum=chilenum[_n-1]+1 if pid[_n]!=pid[_n-1] & age[_n]<=18 & age[_n-1]<=18 & child[_n]==1 & child[_n-1]==1
by family: replace chilenum=chilenum[_n-1] if pid[_n]==pid[_n-1] & age[_n]<=18 & age[_n-1]<=18 & child[_n]==1 & child[_n-1]==1
forval i=1/250 {
by family: replace chilenum=chilenum[_n-`i']+1 if pid[_n]!=pid[_n-`i'] & age[_n]<=18 & age[_n-`i']<=18 & age[_n-`i'+1]>18 & child[_n]==1 & child[_n-`i']==1
}
forval i=1/250 {
by family: replace chilenum=chilenum[_n-`i']+1 if pid[_n]!=pid[_n-`i'] & age[_n]<=18 & age[_n-`i']<=18 & age[_n-`i'+1]>18 & chilenum[_n]==chilenum[_n-`i'] & child[_n]==1 & child[_n-`i']==1
}


Alternatively, if anyone knows how to generate the variables below from a PANEL dataset, that would also be very helpful...

“boy1st” if   First child born is male;
“girl1st” if First child born is female
“boy2nd” if Second child born is male
“girl2nd” if Second child born is female   and so on.

Any help would be highly appreciated.

Best regards,
Jorge

PhD student,
Department of economics,
University of Essex.



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