Hallo everybody and thanks in advance for any kind of suggestion.
I am working on a large dataset about investors in mutual funds (more than 10 millions obs); every person in my dataset is currently identified by an ID code (numeric) built merging asset manager code, customer code and year code. This means that the usual shape is like 370000002973312003 (firm 37, customer 297331, year 2003): i do not have the single parts of the code, but only the whole code.
Now, the issue is that i have several observations for each person in every year, but i need to work with a typical panel setup. Usually i solve the issue using a tag command that gives me a unique identifier of each person-year combination; this time, however, i fail in using this shortcut... In particular the issue seems to be the way Stata uses to store this ID code; when i use concatenate or destring commands i obtain strange results. I was wondering if there is a way to re-code all the customers in a more convenient way through a single command.
Thanks
Simone