Help Generating Dummy Variable WestCoast

[Jason Browen]

Dear all,

I am using Stata 16, on mac. Here is a snapshot of my dataset which consists of population and GDP for all 50 states over a the period of three years 2016-2018. I want to create a dummy variable called WestCoast = 1 if the State is California, Oregon, or Washington and 0 if otherwise but I do not know how to do so.

Thank you in advance for your help

Jason Browen

[diana gold]

This should work, but be sure to match exactly what is inside the quotes to the state names you have.

gen WestCoast = inlist(state, "California", "Oregon", "Washington")

[Jason Browen]

I copied and pasted the code you mentioned into Stata. Unfortunately it does not work

[David Benson]

Hi Jason, when you say it didn't work, what do you mean and what, exactly, happened? I suspect it's either a misspelling somewhere or there were extra spaces in the state.

dataex state
* Example generated by -dataex-. To install: ssc install dataex
clear
input str11 state
"Alabama"    
"Alaska"    
"Arizona"    
"California"
"Colorado"  
"Connecticut"
"Delaware"  
"Florida"    
"Georgia"    
"Hawaii"    
"Idaho"      
"Indiana"    
"Maine"      
"Michigan"  
"Ohio"      
"Oregon"    
"Washington"
end

replace state = trim(itrim(state))  // this will remove any extra spaces
gen WestCoast = inlist(state, "California", "Oregon", "Washington")
gen midwest = inlist(state, "Michigan", "Indiana", "Ohio")

** Same as above, but using two lines and using the | ("pipe") for "or"
gen east = 0
replace east = 1 if state=="Connecticut" | state=="Delaware" | state=="Maine"

. list, noobs abbrev(12)

  +------------------------------------------+
  |       state   WestCoast   midwest   east |
  |------------------------------------------|
  |     Alabama           0         0      0 |
  |      Alaska           0         0      0 |
  |     Arizona           0         0      0 |
  |  California           1         0      0 |
  |    Colorado           0         0      0 |
  |------------------------------------------|
  | Connecticut           0         0      1 |
  |    Delaware           0         0      1 |
  |     Florida           0         0      0 |
  |     Georgia           0         0      0 |
  |      Hawaii           0         0      0 |
  |------------------------------------------|
  |       Idaho           0         0      0 |
  |     Indiana           0         1      0 |
  |       Maine           0         0      1 |
  |    Michigan           0         1      0 |
  |        Ohio           0         1      0 |
  |------------------------------------------|
  |      Oregon           1         0      0 |
  |  Washington           1         0      0 |
  +------------------------------------------+

[William Lisowski]

The code in post #2 does not work because the variable state is not a character variable. It is a numeric variable with value labels produced by encoding a string variable. (See earlier posts by the author.)

[Nick Cox]

Jason Browen Please back up and study https://www.statalist.org/forums/help#stata to appreciate that screenshots are not as helpful as you hope. Use dataex to show data examples. The colour coding of your state variable is a subtle clue which underlies the diagnosis in #5. But even experienced users missed it. So, the result is a slower route to a correct answer for you and a small waste of time and effort.

[Jason Browen]

Thank you all so much for all of your help! I figured out what my problem was. I encoded the state variable. Now it works