In research with global scope and country- or country-group resolution, it's common to handle data with one or more [1] dimension(s) identifying a country (countries) for each observation. Problems can arise when inconsistent identifiers—“United States” vs. “United States of America”—are used to label this dimension, either across different data sets, or within one data set.

The best precaution against these problems is to convert idiosyncratic identifiers to short, standard ones, as soon as possible. ISO 3166 alpha-2 or alpha-3 codes (CA or CAN for Canada) are a natural choice for standard identifiers. [2]

In this post, I …

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