Stata tips & tricks

This page is dedicated to empirical researchers who want to improve their Stata skills.

When I started working with admin data, I had to basically re-learn Stata. This is because large administrative data structures require very different skill set than the standard datasets one encounters in graduate school.

Below please find an assorted collection of twitter threads and other resources which contain tips and tricks that should improve and speed up your workflow.

• 1. Essential tips & tricks for admin data analysis
  2. Estimates - how to access them, how to save them, and how to change them
  3. Frames - load multiple datasets into memory at once (PDF presentation here, also covers the PLOT commands)
  4. How to access variable names in big datasets without loading all the data into memory
  5. How to recover do-files and temporary datasets after Stata crashes
  6. Simple version control for output and log-files
  7. Expandrank - expand and rank variables without sorting
  8. Graphs - my custom dataviz programs, very fast and very efficient, especially with big datasets (youtube presentation here)
  9. Graphs - personalizing Stata graphs using the Recorder function
  10. Graphs - interfacing R with Stata to produce cool graphs
  11. Graphs - making custom global schemes (by Asjad Naqvi)
  12. Very good guide on workflow for Stata projects (by Asjad Naqvi)
  13. Stata coding guide (by Julian Reif)
  14. Code and Data for the Social Sciences: A Practitioner’s Guide (by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro)

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