Automating Your Research in Stata: “A Little Bit of Programming Goes An Awfully Long Way!”

This course aims to provide participants with the fundamental Stata programming toolkit in order to facilitate, automate, replicate and personalize both data analysis, management and presentation. As such, session 1 reviews some general Stata commands, illustrating how they can be combined with some powerful Stata programming constructs for looping and branching. The course then moves on to focus on how the programming concepts of Macros, Loops, and Branching, can be implemented to effectively write, modify and develop do files (user written Stata programs).

Researchers or professionals with previous programming skills in other software wishing to work effectively in Stata. Existing Stata users wishing to acquire the “standard” Stata programming toolkit in order to implement basic programming techniques to effectively automate a substantial part of their empirical data analysis.

It is expected that individuals wishing to follow this course have a sound working knowledge of Stata. Participants are not however, required to have any programming experience in Stata or in other statistical packages.

SESSION I: ORGANISING, MANIPULATING AND VISUALIZING YOUR DATASETS WITHIN A DO-FILE – A REVIEW

1. Saving the dataset
   • save, preserve, restore
2. Advanced data management commands
   • keep and drop
   • sort and gsort
   • by-processing
   • append
   • merge and joinby
   • collapse and contract
   • order, aorder, move, reshape (for panel data)

SESSION II: STATA CONSTRUCTS FOR DO-FILES PROGRAMMING

1. Stata syntax
2. Global and local macros
   • Global macros
   • Local macros
   • Recalling macros
3. Scalars and matrices
4. Extended macro functions
5. Macro increment and decrement functions
6. Advanced local macro manipulation
7. Temporary objects
   • Temporary variables: tempvar
   • Temporary Matrices and vectors: tempname
   • Temporary Files: tempfile
8. Looping in Stata
   • Looping using foreach
   • Looping using forvalues
   • Looping using while
9. Branching in Stata with: if and else
10. Writing and modifying a Stata program
    • Programs without arguments
    • Programs with positional arguments
    • Programs with named positional arguments
    • Storing and retrieving program results
11. Programs with arguments using the syntax construct

SESSION III: AUTOMATION DO-FILE PROGRAMMING IN PRACTICE – MAKING LIFE EASIER!

1. A DO-file template
2. Master and Using DO-files
3. Speeding-up your workflow within a DO-file: real examples
   • Running estimations under alternative model specifications
   • Building, modifying and automating tables of estimation output
   • Returning estimation (return, ereturn)
   • Building, modifying and automating graphs
   • Stata graphic capabilities
   • The syntax of the graph command
   • Customizing graphs

SESSION IV: EXPLICIT SUBSCRIPTS IN STATA

This course is being offered on the second day of the first Greek Stata Users Conference that will be held on the 28th and 29th of January 2027 at the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB).

Giovanni Cerulli, Ph.D. National Research Council of Italy – IRCrES

CONFERENCE ONLY

• Students*: € 40.00
• Others: € 95.00

CONFERENCE / TRAINING COURSE

• Students* € 125.00
• Others: € 350.00

*To be eligible for student prices, participants must provide proof of their full-time student status for the current academic year. All participation fees are subject to VAT (applied at the current Italian rate of 22%); Individuals interested in participating should return their duly completed registration forms to the conference organizers by the 15 January 2027 at the very latest.

FUNDING FOR DOCTORAL STUDENTS
TStat is delighted to sponsor, via our project “Investing in Young Researchers”, TWO full-time Ph.D. students from any of the countries for which TStat is the official Stata Distributor. Sponsorship covers both the first day of the conference and the training course. Travel expenses are however, to be paid by the participant.