I have a 20 x 4000 dataframe in Python using pandas. Two of these columns are named Year and quarter. I'd like to create a variable called period that makes Year = 2000 and quarter= q2 into 2000q2.

Can anyone help with that?

If both columns are strings, you can concatenate them directly:

df["period"] = df["Year"] + df["quarter"]

If one (or both) of the columns are not string typed, you should convert it (them) first,

df["period"] = df["Year"].astype(str) + df["quarter"]

Beware of NaNs when doing this!

If you need to join multiple string columns, you can use agg:

df['period'] = df[['Year', 'quarter', ...]].agg('-'.join, axis=1)

Where "-" is the separator.