This column will focus on how to improve your fluency in Stata. Over the next issues we will look at Stata problems of intermediate size which turn out to be soluble with a few command lines. As an introduction, systematic ways of repeating the same or similar operations are surveyed to give one...

Data for people in a family, firms in a sector, or members of any kind of group are often analyzed using data for the other members in each group. Examples are the number of older children for each child in a family or the mean investment of other firms in the same year. Many such problems yield...

The by varlist: construct is reviewed, showing how it can be used to tackle a variety of problems with group structure. These range from simply doing some calculations for each of several groups of observations to doing more advanced manipulations making use of the fact that with this construct,...