Creating group identifiers

[Lewe Bahnsen]

Hello Statalisters,

I'm totally new to this forum and relatively new to Stata, so I hope I'm doing everything right. My situation is the following:
I have a pooled data set consisting of four cross-sections. Variables of interest are the income and the household type (1 to 5). Creating income groups within the periods is no problems, so that i get this e.g.:

year	income	group
1	2	1
1	4	2
1	6	3
2	3	1
2	5	2
2	7	3
3	1	1
3	4	2
3	8	3

this can be easily done while looping over the xtile command:

gen group=.
forvalues t=$tmin(5)$tmax{
sort income
xtile trash=income if year==`t', nq(3)
replace group=trash if year==`t'
drop trash
}

My problem is now that I want more diversified groups. The aim is to get three income groups for each household type in each period. I have tried several ways but didn't get what I wanted.

Thanks in advance!

[Nick Cox]

See e.g. http://www.stata-journal.com/sjpdf.h...iclenum=dm0034

So you can

 
egen group2 = group(type year)

and loop over the distinct values of your new variable. More at http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/da...ach/index.html