Managing the U.S. Census 2000 and World Development Indicators databases for statistical analysis in Stata

This article introduces a new Stata command, labcenswdi, to automatically manage databases that provide variable descriptions on the second row in a dataset. While renaming all variables and converting them from string to numeric, labcenswdi automatically manages the variable descriptions including removing them from the second row to place them into Stata variable labels and saving them to a text file. The process yields a dataset ready for statistical analysis. I illustrate how this command can be used to efficiently manage datasets obtained from the U.S. Census 2000 and the World Development Indicators databases. Copyright 2011 by StataCorp LP.