Re: st: tricky data merge/joinby problem

["Dimitriy V. Masterov" <dvmaster@gmail.com>]

David,

I wrote m:m merge since each BG usually appears more than once in the
first file (since blocks are the ids) and more than once in the second
(since it's a block group panel). I checked a few cases with the real
data and it seems to have worked. I just wanted to make sure that
there was nothing that I was missing and hoping to find a special case
that does not produce garbage.

By expanding into a panel, I meant stack the file1 on top of itself
four times (4 quarters of 2010) and create a dateyq variable. The data
would not change over time, but it seemed to make m:1 by date and bgid
easier (at least in my head).

The reason I wanted to try merge is that is appears to be much faster
than joinby, which has been running for a long time on a pretty fast
server.

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