st: RE: lags and leads

["Jacobs, David" <jacobs.184@sociology.osu.edu>]

Why not just use Stata's convention for leads and lags?  Putting a -l.- before a variable lags it by one period.  Putting -l2.- lags it by 2 periods.  Putting -f2.- leads that variable by 2 periods.  

And you don't have to worry about lags slipping into the next case.  And and this convention works in front of parentheses, which will produce the same lags or leads for the all of the variables included within the parentheses.

Dave Jacobs

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Claudius Li
Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2012 1:29 PM
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: st: lags and leads

Hi,
I have a panel dataset with a "score" and "count" variable for every state (ie akscore, akcount, alscore, alcount, etc.). I want to create 7 leads and lags of each of these variables (ie akscorelag1 ..
akscorelag7, alscorelag1 .. alscorelag7, akscorelead1 .. akscorelead7,
alscorelead1 .. akscorelead7, akcountlag1 .. akcountlag7, etc.).
So I've got:

order *score, sequential
order *count, sequential
foreach var of varlist *score{
	forvalues dist = 1/7{
		gen `var'lag`dist' = `var'[_n-`dist']
		gen `var'lead`dist' = `var'[_n+`dist']
	}
}

foreach var of varlist *count{
	forvalues dist = 1/7{
		gen `var'lag`dist' = `var'[_n-`dist']
		gen `var'lead`dist' = `var'[_n+`dist']
	}
}

That works but I want to combine the two loops so I tried:

order *score, sequential
order *count, sequential
foreach var of varlist *score{
	forvalues dist = 1/7{
		gen substr(`var',1,2)score+lag`dist' = `var'[_n-`dist']
		gen substr(`var',1,2)count+lag`dist' = `var'[_n-`dist']
		gen substr(`var',1,2)score+lead`dist' = `var'[_n+`dist']
		gen substr(`var',1,2)count+lead`dist' = `var'[_n+`dist']
	}
}

but I get:
( invalid name

Am I using substr wrong? Is there a better way to do this?

-Claudius

*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/

*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/