Looping with distance matching - stata

Question

I want to match treated firms to control firms by industry and year considering firms that are the closest in terms of profitability (roa). I want a 1:1 match. I am using a distance measure (mahalanobis).
I have 530,000 firm-year observations in my sample, namely 267,000 treated observations and 263,000 control observations approximatively. Here is my code:
gen neighbor1 = .
gen idobs = .
levelsof industry
local a = r(levels)
levelsof year
local b = r(levels)
foreach i in `a' {
foreach j in `b'{
capture noisily psmatch2 treat if industry == `i' & year == `j', mahalanobis(roa)
capture noisily replace neighbor1 = _n1 if industry == `i' & year == `j'
capture noisily replace idobs = _id if industry == `i' & year == `j'
drop _treated _support _weight _id _n1 _nn
}
}
Treat is my treatment variable. It takes the value of 1 for treated observations and 0 for non-treated observations.
The command psmatch2 creates the variable _n1 and _id among others. _n1 is the id number of the matched observation (closest neighbor) and _id is an id number (1 - 530,000) that is unique to each observation.
The code 'works', i.e. I get no error message. My variable neighbor1 has 290,724 non-missing observations.
However, these 290,724 observations vary between 1 and 933 which is odd. The variable neighbor1 should provide me the observation id number of the matched observation, which can vary between 1 and 530,000.
It seems that the code erases or ignores the result of the matching process in different subgroups. What am I doing wrong?
Edit:
I found a public dataset and adapted my previous code so that you can run my code with this dataset and see more clearly what the problem could be.
I am using Vella and Verbeek (1998) panel data on 545 men worked every year from 1980-1987 from this website: https://www.stata.com/texts/eacsap/
Let's say that I want to match treated observations, i.e. people, to control observations by marriage status (married) and year considering people that worked a similar number of hours (hours), i.e. the shortest distance.
I create a random treatment variable (treat) for the sake of this example.
use http://www.stata.com/data/jwooldridge/eacsap/wagepan.dta
gen treat = round(runiform())
gen neighbor1 = .
gen idobs = .
levelsof married
local a = r(levels)
levelsof year
local b = r(levels)
foreach i in `a' {
foreach j in `b'{
capture noisily psmatch2 treat if married == `i' & year == `j', mahalanobis(hours)
capture noisily replace neighbor1 = _n1 if married == `i' & year == `j'
capture noisily replace idobs = _id if married == `i' & year == `j'
drop _treated _support _weight _id _n1 _nn
}
}
What this code should do is to look at each subgroup of observations: 444 observations in 1980 that are not married, 101 observations in 1980 that are married, ..., and 335 observations in 1987 that are married. In each of these subgroups, I would like to match a treated observation to a control observation considering the shortest distance in the number of hours worked.
There are two problems that I see after running the code.
First, the variable idobs should take a unique number between 1 and 4360 because there are 4360 observations in this dataset. It is just an ID number. It is not the case. A few observations can have an ID number 1, 2 and so on.
Second, neighbor1 varies between 1 and 204 meaning that the matched observations have only ID numbers varying from 1 to 204.
What is the problem with my code?

Answer 1

Here is a solution using the command iematch, installed through the package ietoolkit -> ssc install ietoolkit. For disclosure, I wrote this command. psmatch2 is great if you want the ATT. But if all you want is to match observations across two groups using nearest neighbor, then iematch is cleaner.
In both commands you need to make each industry-year match in a subset, then combine that information. In both commands the matched group ID will restart from 1 in each subset.
Using your example data, this creates one matchID var for each subset, then you will have to find a way to combine these to a single matchID without conflicts across the data set.
* use data set and keep only vars required for simplicity
use http://www.stata.com/data/jwooldridge/eacsap/wagepan.dta, clear
keep year married hour
* Set seed for replicability. NEVER use the 123456 seed in production, randomize a new seed
set seed 123456
*Generate mock treatment
gen treat = round(runiform())
*generate vars to store results
gen matchResult = .
gen matchDiff = .
gen matchCount = .
*Create locals for loops
levelsof married
local married_statuses = r(levels)
levelsof year
local years = r(levels)
*Loop over each subgroup
foreach year of local years {
foreach married_status of local married_statuses {
*This command is similar to psmatch2, but a simplified version for
* when you are not looking for the ATT.
* This command is only about matching.
iematch if married == `married_status' & year == `year', grp(treat) match(hour) seedok m1 maxmatch(1)
*These variables list meta info about the match. See helpfile for docs,
*but this copy info from each subset in this loop to single vars for
*the full data set. Then the loop specfic vars are dropped
replace matchResult = _matchResult if married == `married_status' & year == `year'
replace matchDiff = _matchDiff if married == `married_status' & year == `year'
replace matchCount = _matchCount if married == `married_status' & year == `year'
drop _matchResult _matchDiff _matchCount
*For each loop you will get a match ID restarting at 1 for each loop.
*Therefore we need to save them in one var for each loop and combine afterwards.
rename _matchID matchID_`married_status'_`year'
}
}