Watching TV and learning STATA…?

Stata Corp. announced a channel on YouTube. Yes, I know, it is not exactly television, but you can lean back and watch videos on how to do something with Stata.

Here is the link

http://www.youtube.com/user/statacorp

Data storage type matters

Despite most sources tell that the storage type in stata should not matter, it is worth checking whether this is the case for your dataset. I just came across a situation where two identically constructed datasets (one stored in default type (float) and one stored in double) generated different output. Also before that i encountered a problem with person identifiers in the GSOEP if using the default data storage. If your dataset is not huge (with the GSOEP it still works quite ok) it might be worth to take the safe side and use

set type double

before you assemble your data set. This saves the data in the most precise way stata offers.

Turning Footnotes into Endnotes …

Submitting (LaTeX) written papers has some advantages: one usually does not have to change any formatting manually. LaTeX does that for us if it is instructed to do so. Journals often want the submissions to be formatted in a peculiar way. My challenge was to change footnotes to endnotes. I did remember that it was easy in LaTeX, but not how it was done, so Google had to help me …

Greek Letters in Stata Graphs

There is a rather easy way of including Greek letters in Stata figures.

Greek letters are written in the following way:

= {&beta}

Preamble when switching between OS X and Windows

A problem when working on one and the same project on different platforms (here: Windows and Mac/OS X) is that path-names differ. There are two straightforward solutions to this:

1) When defining a number of different path (e.g. one path where data is stored, one where results/output is stored), it is handy to define the paths as globals and to add an “if” condition. The platform can be detected by the local `c(os)’:

Bold/Italic Columns in Latex Tables

I just came across an easy way to format whole columns in bold or italic style:

\usepackage{array}

\begin{tabular}{l>{\bfseries}c}
first row & second row \\
default & bold \\
\end{tabular}

Stacked graphs in Stata

For plotting the relative importance of (e.g.) input shares, it can be useful to stack them in a figure. In my specific problem, I wanted to show the development of low-, medium-, and high-skilled labour inputs, relative to all labour inputs over time. Since the three shares obviously sum up to 1, I wanted to have a figure like this: