Often in accounting/ financial research, we need count the number of firms in certain industries or analysts covering the firm.
A simple way to count the number of observations in Stata is using the “_N” command, which stands for total number in certain condition.
Let use our auto.dta
sysuse auto.dta
**Count the number of domestic/ foreign models
bysort foreign: gen n_models=_N
***this will yield 52 domestic models and 22 foreign models