st: lags and leads

[Claudius Li <claudiusli@janysanalytics.com>]

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

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