st: generating unemployment spells from a panel of overlapping employment spells

[László Sándor <sandorl@gmail.com>]

Hi,
I might miss some [ST] feature of Stata, so I think I'd better ask for
quick ideas and guidance before I waste days coding.

I have annual data on employment spell in the form of "first month"
and "last month" variables for each job, people can hold multiple jobs
(though maybe I want to neglect some, like self-employment, but that's
easy), and for every year each job ends in December if not sooner, and
usually restart (continue) the next year with a "first month" ==
January observation for next year.

I want to create multiple-spell data from this for those who were
employed at some point but then had no job. Eventually I want to have
-stset- data for the unemployment spells, with multiple spells for
some.

Is anything like -snapspan- and -stjoin- helpful for this, or it is
best to brute force it?

Thanks,

Laszlo
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