StataTools

My user-written commands/packages for data analysis in Stata

The included packages are:

• exampleobs prints (randomly selected) example observations and optionally stores the values in a local macro. This is useful to explore possible values of a variable in your data set without being biased by the ordering of the data.
• head prints the head observations (first observations in data set) and mimics the head() function in R and head command in Linux.
• latexify converts matrix results to LaTeX tables row by row, for more flexible table creation than available from other packages.
• randomselect randomly selects observations and marks them with a dummy variable. It differs from sample in that it does not drop the non-selected observations from the data set, and that either individual observations or other units, defined by a variable in the data set, can be randomly selected.
• tail prints the tail observations (last observations in data set) and mimics the tail() function in R and tail command in Linux.
• uniquevals counts unique observations for a set of variables. The advantages of uniquevals over the popular user-written unique command (Hills and Brady, 1998) are that it is faster with big data sets especially when these are already sorted, and works with by prefix (e.g., to show number of unique counties by state).

These packages can be downloaded directly through Stata using ssc install <package_name>, replace

Note: uniquevals and latexify are not yet available directly through Stata and do not yet include help file documentation.

Example scripts

• event_study.do is a self-contained do file that generates an event study difference-in-differences graph.