# Calculating wage growth for individuals over two consecutive months

**URL:** <https://forum.ipums.org/t/calculating-wage-growth-for-individuals-over-two-consecutive-months/1743>\
**Category:** CPS\
**Created:** [May 16, 2017, 7:49pm UTC](https://forum.ipums.org/t/calculating-wage-growth-for-individuals-over-two-consecutive-months/1743 "2017-05-16T19:49:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![uctpdtz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ce73a5/32.png) [@uctpdtz](https://forum.ipums.org/u/uctpdtz)\
**Post date:** [May 16, 2017, 7:49pm UTC](https://forum.ipums.org/t/calculating-wage-growth-for-individuals-over-two-consecutive-months/1743/1 "2017-05-16T19:49:00Z")

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I’d like to exploit the panel dimension of the monthly files to calculate monthly wage growth for individuals. My naive quick attempt in stata was:

gen modate = ym(year, month)

format modate %tm

xtset cpsidp modate

gen wgegrwth=hourwage/L.hourwage-1

However, I don’t get any values generated for this (all data missing). No doubt this is too naive but any thoughts on best practice welcome.

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