Dear Statalists,

I am currently working on my master thesis with Paneldata from the German Socioeconomic Panel and have a problem regarding the created dummy variable: deprivation.
Since deprivation-variables are from 2001 on and only available every second year I want to fill the missing years with the values of the previous year (which I know how to do).
In order to do so I wanted to check, whether the income (5 categories in relation to median equivincome) of a person changes in the missing year, where I just filled in the value to make sure there wont be a bias. Therefore I want to create a change variable for deprivation and income (t to t+2; e.g. 2001 to 2003) and compare the two. I am only familiar with basic gen, recode and egen-commands and haven't found anything in the forum, probably because I am not really sure what I am looking for... can anyone help me?

Thank you in advance!