Econ 5010 Page

This page provides links to all important information available on this web site for those enrolled in my Econ 5010 sections this fall.

Important Links

Textbook Website This site is maintained by the publisher of your textbook, Addison-Wesley, and contains a lot of useful information. Textbook Errata, powerpoint slides, data sets, tutorials and other stuff.
Syllabus
The Stata Starter kit from UCLA. This is particularly valuable for those learning to use Stata. There are a number of online tutorials with notes that are available. To get used to using Stata, I suggest looking at the class notes with movies found here.

Datasets

The CPS data from Chapter 3
The California schools data from Chapter 4-7
The Economics Journal Subscription Data Used in Chapter 6
The Massachusetts Test Score Data Used in Chapter 7
The Wage Data from Jeffrey Wooldridge
- STATA Dataset.

Office Hours

Wednesday 8:40-11:30 and by appointment.

Homework

Exercises from chapter 2 (2.1-2.3) in your textbook. No due date.
Go to UCLA ATS and view the 'entering data movie' in the class notes section. This movie lasts about half an hour. Enjoy!
Importing Excel spreadsheets into Stata exercise. The first thing to note is that Stata will not read in Excel spreadsheets directly. If you have entered your data into an Excel spreadsheet you will have to save that spreadsheet in a format that Stata will read. The easiest choices are comma separated value or tab delimited format. In this excercise download the Excel spreadsheet for 'The California schools data from Chapter 4-7' listed above. Then open it in Excel, save it as a comma separated value file (.csv) or a tab delimited file (.txt). Finally, import the .csv or .txt file you created into Stata. Check to see that the file is imported correctly using Stata's data browser.
Complete the following exercise using Stata. Computer Homework 2.
Complete the following exercise using Stata. Computer Homework 3.
Complete the following exercise using Stata. Computer Homework 4. Due on 15 November.
Complete the following exercise using Stata. Computer Homework 5. Due on 22 November.
This program produced the output in Table 8.1 from Stock and Watson. This is a .do file that reproduces the results in the textbook. For a copy of the output, Click here. Your assignment is to read chapter 8 and have a look at the Stata program and results.

Want your own copy of STATA?

Go Here

Our class is setup with STATA with what they call GradPlan 2. This means that they will sell you a 1 year license for STATA and a Getting Started manual (either Intercooled=$89 or Small=$45) for not too much money. For about $150, you can get a perpetual license for Intercooled Stata--a pretty good deal, actually. You'll need to know our that our course id is OKECON to order Stata. Small STATA is probably not big enough for all assignments in this course. You'll need Intercooled Stata to do your homework. Purchase of this software is completely optional. If you do not want to part with your hard earned cash, then you can use it for free in the CBA lab or on the Trading Floor (at least it should be on the Trading Floor).

Stata Links

The Stata Website
Resources for learning Stata
- Loading web based data into STATA. Unfortuantely, this only works from Internet Explorer (or other web browsers that support Microsoft's .mht format) at this time.
Introduction to Stata
Some of you have asked me, "Why aren't we using SPSS?" Although SPSS is particularly adept at analysis of variance, it is not as well suited for the robust kinds of analyses that I think you should be using. Hence, I picked STATA, which is relatively good at this sort of thing and still offers a reasonably powerful engine for doing the things that SPSS does. Version 9 of STATA made some significant strides in this area. For a comparison of SAS, SPSS, and STATA (older version) see UCLA's software comparison.

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Page last modified Wednesday, September 14, 2005.