If you’re a Stata user, you will appreciate these. I especially like the dadjoke command.
Idea that rich people have lots of debt was due to a simple Stata error
There but for the grace of God go I: Back in January, the Urban Institute—a widely respected Washington think tank—published a statistic about student debt that pretty soon caught fire among economics journalists. Based on an analysis of federal data, its researchers concluded that 49 percent of all outstanding education loans belonged to highest-earning quarter of American households. In other...
Geocoding in Stata
I had to geocode about 50,000 addresses for a project recently and found a new user-written Stata command, georoute: The authors argue their command is easier to use than others, some of which apparently don’t work anymore. The major issue for all of these commands appears to be the source dataset. Turns out it is tough to process thousands of observations, while at the same time geocoding...
Understanding xtsum output in Stata
I put this handout together for students in my causal class; you might find it useful:
The death of SAS and SPSS in academia
Where is the growth? In R and Stata, of course:
What’s interesting is the discrepancy between the death and growth rates. Mixed in here is a hidden trend, I believe, where scholars are much less likely in general to mention the statistical software they used in their research.
Understanding weight calculations in Stata’s psmatch2
UPDATE: Edwin Leuven was kind enough to comment on my post and has a much better explanation of the weight situation: If you’ve ever used psmatch2 in Stata, you know that it has one of the least useful help files ever created. I’ve always been frustrated with not understanding how the weights in psmatch2 are calculated, so I decided to sit down and figure it out. After running...
How to interpret interaction terms
I keep referring to this issue in manuscript reviews, so I thought it worth a post. If you include an interaction term in a model, the statistical significance of the main effects and the interaction term tells you nothing about the interactive effect. This seems contrary to your intuition. Turns out the interactive effect may only significantly differ from zero for part of the covariate space...
Exporting Stata output
This is the most comprehensive list I have seen on all the different ways of exporting Stata output into Excel:
Making my code public
My New Year’s resolution for 2014 is to publicly post all of my Stata code for my projects. Why? This will force me to be more careful with my code, even though I am already somewhat anal when it comes to my code.