CONTENT
Become an expert in organizing your work in Stata. Make the most of Stata’s scripting language to improve your workflow and create concretely reproducible analyses. Learn how branching, looping, flow of control, and accessing stored estimation results can speed up your work and lead to more complete analyses. Learn about bootstrapping and Monte Carlo simulations, too.
PREREQUISITES
Stata 16 installed and working.
Basic knowledge of using Stata interactively
Internet web browser, installed and working (course is platform independent)
PROGRAM
LESSON I: ORGANIZATION OF ANALYSIS
Welcome
Entering and executing a program
The do-file
The interactive program command
A program in a do-file
Combination do-files
Ado-files
Organizing do-files
An individual do-file
A do-file to perform verification
Infiling data
Reproducibility
Indexing
assert as an alternative to branching
Consuming calculated results
LESSON II: MACROS, ARGUMENTS, AND LOOPING
Macros
How macros might be used
Macro names
The related-persons example
Another example (plant data)
Potential problem—variable scope
More on arguments
Branching and looping
Physical program style
foreach
Looping across observations
if
LESSON III: EXAMPLES AND APPLICATIONS
Data management example
Handling time and date variables
Checking assumptions
Returned values and storing results
What can be returned in r()?
Referring to returned results in other programs
Referring to returned results in the program that sets them
Bootstrapped standard errors
Aside: reading a trace
A warning on bootstrapping
Speeding up bootstrapping
Bootstrapping, how to
Monte Carlo simulations
postfile and post
Using quietly
Speeding up simulations
LESSON IV: ADO-FILES
A first real ado-file
discard
More improvements to doanl
capture
The exit command
Making doanl a general tool
Writing a help file for doanl
Do-files, programs, and ado-files: When to use which
Temporary variables
Temporarily destroying data
Temporary files
An analysis-specific ado-file
General-purpose (GP) ado-files
A GP ado-file
Fine-tuning display output
Stata syntax
syntax
varlist macro
syntax’s other specifiers
Whether to use syntax
A note on quotes
Version control
Note: There is a one-week break between the posting of Lessons 2 and 3; however, course leaders are available for discussion.
