Error in FlexPanelDID command

[Ritika Dhingra]

Hi,

I am learning to use the FlexPanelDID command in stata (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....act_id=3692458). I ran the code on their dataset itself but I get this error. Can someone please help me with this?

invalid file specification

I run it with 'set trace on' and the command above the error is this:

version 6.0
- syntax [varlist(default=none)] using/ [, UNMatched(str) noLabel REPLACE UPDATE _merge(str) ]

Please let me know if you have faced same error and can help here.

Thanks,
Ritika

[Justin Niakamal]

I would try reinstalling flexpaneldid (SSC).

use "http://fmwww.bc.edu/RePEc/bocode/f/flexpaneldid_example_data.dta", clear

flexpaneldid patents, id(cusip) treatment(treatment) time(year) statmatching(con(employ stckpr rnd sales) ///
              cat(pats_cat rndstck_cat)) outcometimerelstart(3) outcomedev(-2 -1) test prepdataset("preprocessed_data.dta")


********************************************************************************
************************* Conditional Diff-in-Diff *****************************
********************************************************************************

Average treatment effect for the treated
Estimator       : Nearest neighbor          No. of treated obs       =        47
Distance metric : Statistical DF            No. of unique controls   =        39
                                            Mean no. of matches      =         1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Outcome     |       mean Diff      |   DiD*   |AI robust |     z        P>|z|
            |  treated  | controls |          |   S.E.   |          |
------------+-----------+----------+----------+----------+----------+-----------
patents     |  -10.0213 | -7.8176  |  -2.2037 |  5.7238  |  -0.3850 |  0.7020
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Consistent bias-corrected estimator as proposed in Abadie & Imbens (2006,2011).

.

[Pradeep Fonseka]

I ran their code without a problem

First, you run flexpaneldid_preprocessing
save the file
then, clear import the file again
then, run flexpaneldid

generated their expected result