The manual entry for xtmixed documents all the official features in the command, and several applications. However, it would be impossible to address all the models that can be fitted with this command in a manual entry. I want to show you how to include covariates in a crossed-effects model.

Let me start by reviewing the crossed-effects notation for xtmixed. I will use the homework dataset from Kreft and de Leeuw (1998) (a subsample from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988). You can download the dataset from the webpage for Rabe-Hesketh & Skrondal (2008) (http://www.stata-press.com/data/mlmus2.html), and run all the examples in this entry. Read more…

As everyone knows, I am a big proponent of Statalist, and not just for selfish reasons, although those reasons play a role. Nearly every member of the technical staff at StataCorp — me included — are members of Statalist. Even when we don’t participate in a particular thread, we do pay attention. The discussions on Statalist play an important role concerning Stata’s development.

Statalist is a discussion group, not just a question-and-answer forum. Nonetheless, new members often use it to obtain answers to questions and that works because those questions sometimes become gist for subsequent discussions. In those cases, the questioners not only get answers, they get much more. Read more…

Insiders have been waiting for the second edition of Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data by Jeffrey M. Wooldridge. I have a copy and really recommend it; later I will write a review as to why.

The book is available at the Stata bookstore and the MIT Press bookstore. It is $84 at our bookstore and $94 at MIT. The book is not yet available from Amazon.

Andrew J. Dyck wrote a nice post on his blog on how to Download and unzip data files from Stata. He writes

Recently, I’ve been using Stata’s -shp2dta- command to convert some shapefiles to stata format, grabbing Lat/Lon data and merging into another dataset. There were several compressed shapefiles I wanted to download contained in a directory from the web. I could manually download each file and uncompress each one but that would be time consuming. Also, when the maps are updated, I’d have to do the download/uncompress all over again. I’ve found that the process can be automated from within Stata by using a combination of -shell- and some handy terminal commands. …

You should read the rest of his post. He goes on to show how you can script with Stata to automate shelling out to download and unzip a series of files from a website, and he introduces you to some cool Unix-like utilities for Windows.

We here at StataCorp use Stata for tasks like this all the time. In fact, we have built some tools into Stata to allow you to do much of what Andrew described without ever having to leave or shell out of Stata. Read more…