I think Michael meant what he said, but both
devices can be useful, depending on what
you want to calculate.
Nick
[email protected]
Wanli Zhao
> Thanks a lot. BTW, I think you mean "egen
> sumgt68=sum(age>68), by(gvkey)".
> Muck quicker than my way. Learn something.
Michael Blasnik
> >I found something interesting & puzzling. Maybe I just miss
> something.
> >I have a dataset like this:
> <snip>
> > Now, I want to have the number of people older than 68 by
> each gvkey.
> > So I do {egen old=count(age) if age>=69,by(gvkey)}. Then I
> found that
> > the number is correct but it only shows when the age
> variable is 69 or
> > bigger. I thought it would put the same number within gvkey
> for each
> > age, just as I experienced a lot of such functions do. Certainly, I
> > did the following:
> > gsort gvkey -old
> > by gvkey: replace old=old=[_n-1] if old==.
> >
> > That's OK. But for the outsider, I want the number of 1's
> within each
> > gvkey so I did {egen outside=sum(outsider), by(gvkey)}. This time,
> > there is no missing value. Why the "count" behaves differently?
> > Certainly, I can generate another dummy for age bigger than 68 and
> > then sum that up. Same result. But I just wonder why
> "count" did not
> > fill in all the values?
> I think this behavior can be frustrating at times, but it
> certainly isn't
> puzzling and I'd like to know what your examples are of other
> Stata commands
> that don't follow this convention. Commands that use -if-
> clauses usually
> only operate on observations meeting the qualifier: gen
> x2=x^2 if x>5 will
> create missing values in x2 for any cases where x is not
> greater than .
> -egen- follows this same behavior and your example with the
> egen sum doesn't
> have an -if- clause. I have long thought that there ought to
> be an egen
> option for filling in these missing values when a function
> yields a constant
> for each by group. Sometimes you can use logical conditions
> within the
> function to accomplish this, as in egen
> sumgt68=sum(x*(age>68)), by(gvkey).
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