In a recent post we looked at listing percentiles of a variable. When it comes to getting an overview of a variable perhaps the simplest and most powerful command is summarize along with the detail option:
sysuse nlsw88, clear
summarize wage, detail
This is great because we get a bunch of different percentiles, including quartiles without having to specify anything. In order to just get an overview this should suffice nicely. If there’s a need to look at more specific percentile (let’s say the 85th), we can do something like this:
xtile pct_85 = wage, nq(100)
summarize wage if pct_85==85
As we can see there are 23 observations that fall within the bracket of the 85th percentile.