Date formatting | GENIE database

[Girish Venkataraman]

Hello all,

I downloaded the csv file of information from the GENIE database. The date format is an integer but it is not formatting right based on the Stata -format- command with %td
I am getting dates in the future with the command below. Tried converting to string and redoing the code, but it still does not work.

Is there some universal integer datetime different from the Stata notation of datetime?

format int_contact %td

* Example generated by -dataex-. For more info, type help dataex
clear
input int int_contact
19225
12057
23505
23426
18267
14626
20387
27128
26404
22846
23458
22923
24162
17552
22454
30623
20620
20938
24924
20227
28111
25974
23596
19412
26236
21091
24064
15323
18273
28853
25983
21645
22076
24700
24718
14358
24005
21334
16547
26614
    .
    .
23520
25368
20181
20810
26671
29712
25968
    .
21781
17790
22807
14095
28910
15628
27122
18814
25090
23287
16187
24373
23461
23252
20423
24361
15117
25549
20972
26687
23663
19305
25784
16817
18465
26364
17432
27058
20711
23878
23303
24433
16087
20546
25521
18571
23287
15945
17539
17151
16248
24586
23095
22338
23305
20326
16014
20472
17557
15944
end

[Clyde Schechter]

I think you will need to pour over the documentation for the GENIE database itself to find out how their date variables work. In Stata, the numeric value for a date is the number of days since 1 Jan 1960. Other systems often use other "base" dates. Microsoft Excel even has two different "base" dates depending on which version you are using! It is highly likely that GENIE also represents dates by number of days since some base date, but they have probably chosen a different base date. It should be explained somewhere in their data dictionary or other documentation.

Once you find out what their base date is, you can just add or subtract the difference between that date and 1 JAN 1960 to calculate the corresponding number that Stata would use for the same dates. For example, if their base date is 1 JAN 1945 (I just made that up as an example) then their numeric values for a given date will differ from Stata's by

. display td(1jan1960)-td(1jan1945)
5478

Consequently if you subtract 5478 from the GENIE numbers, you will get the Stata numeric values corresponding to the GENIE dates.

[Girish Venkataraman]

That is very useful. I emailed them since I could not find a file documenting a base date.