Speaking Stata: The largest five - A tale of tail values

Cox, Nicholas J.

doi:10.1177/1536867x221106436

Speaking Stata: The largest five - A tale of tail values

Cox, Nicholas J.

Authors

Dr Nicholas Cox n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk
Assistant Professor

Abstract

How do you work with the largest five, or smallest five, or any other fixed number of values in a tail of a distribution? In this column, I give examples of problems and code for basic calculations as a prelude to graphics, tables, and more detailed analysis. The main illustration is analysis of concentration among firms or companies, with wider discussion mentioning hydrology, climatology, cryptography, and ecology. The examples allow a tutorial covering sorting and ranking and using if and in to select observations, by: as a framework for groupwise calculations, indicator variables as a mode of selection, and egen as a Swiss Army knife with many handy functions.

Citation

Cox, N. J. (2022). Speaking Stata: The largest five - A tale of tail values. The Stata Journal, 22(2), 446-459. https://doi.org/10.1177/1536867x221106436

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	May 25, 2022
Online Publication Date	Jun 30, 2022
Publication Date	2022
Deposit Date	Jul 28, 2022
Publicly Available Date	Jul 28, 2022
Journal	The Stata Journal: Promoting communications on statistics and Stata
Print ISSN	1536-867X
Electronic ISSN	1536-8734
Publisher	SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	22
Issue	2
Pages	446-459
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1177/1536867x221106436

Files

Published Journal Article (261 Kb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).