Matching loan data with firms data

[Saleh sharmah]

Dear Stata community readers,
I’m matching firms loan data with firms accounting data in an international sample and I need to match firms’ fiscal year ending accounting data priori to the firms’ loan issuance. For example, suppose firm A obtained a loan in 01/05/2022. I would like to write a code in stata to match firm A loan data with the closest fiscal year ( 11/10/2021) ending to show the true impact on loan spread. My merging code : merge 1:m using a country name , firms’ ticker. Help is greatly appreciated

[George Ford]

why not create a mergeyear variable in both datasets and merge on that? mergeyear in the first dataset depends on the month (<=6 or whatever) and mergeyear in the second dataset is just mergeyear=year.

[Saleh sharmah]

Thanks George for your suggested solution. How would you write that as a code though ?

[Saleh sharmah]

A

[George Ford]

I'll spitball here since I'm not good with dates in Stata.

For the financial data, say you have a variable year:

g mergeyear = year

For the loan issuance data:

g year = year(date)
g month = month(date)
g mergeyear = (year-1)*(month<=6) + year*(month>6)