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The 2020 Portugal Stata Conference was held on 25 January at the University of Porto, Faculty of Economics.

Proceedings

9:30–10:30 Performing meta-analysis with Stata Abstract: Meta-analysis provides a theoretical framework to integrate and analyze empirical evidence from multiple studies. It has been applied to many areas of research such as econometrics, education, psychology, and medicine. The new suite of commands meta provides
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an integrated framework to address the different aspects of our meta-analysis in a simple way. I'll discuss how to prepare and summarize our data, how to address heterogeneity using random-effects models, extend these models to the use of meta-regression, and use post-estimation commands to perform statistical tests and assess possible issues on our data.
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Additional information:
Portugal20_Canette.pdf

Isabel Canette
StataCorp
11:00–12:15
Session I: Empirical analysis using Stata
Chair: Hugo Figueiredo

Everything you always wanted to know about sex discrimination Abstract: In Portugal, over the last two decades, the proportion of women among employed workers increased from 35 to 45 percent. This evolution was accompanied by a sharp fall in the gender wage gap from 32 to 20 percent. The improvement in the wage outcome of the women, however,
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is fully accounted for by the catching up of their skills in comparison to males, after two decades of human capital investments. By 2013 women already possess observable characteristics that enhance productivity identical to their male counterparts. This means that gender discrimination remained roughly constant over the 1991-2013 period. In this study, we investigate the sources of the wage gender gap and conclude that sorting among firms and job-titles can explain about two fifths of the wage gender gap. Peer effects seem to drive wages of women down. In more than one way.

Contributors:
Paulo Guimarães
Pedro Portugal
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Pedro Raposo

Overqualification and future labor market outcomes: Evidence from recent graduates in Portugal Abstract: Using a sample of higher education graduates in Portugal, this paper analyses the career dynamics of workers who entered the labor market for the first time in a job for which they were overqualified. Exploring a large matched employer-employee data set over the
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2006-2012 period, we provide evidence that overqualification is a persistent phenomenon where workers get trap. Six years after entering the labor market, 63% of the workers that entered overqualified remain in that status. Finally, even though, unconditionally, wages at entry are lower for overqualified workers when compared with the wages of well-matched workers, overqualified workers that were able to switch to a well-matched job over the analysed period exhibit a larger wage growth. Actually, taking into account workers observed and unobserved permanent heterogeneity, the estimates reveal that five years after entering the labor market overqualified individuals that were able to switch to a well-matched job experience a wage growth that exceeds the wage growth of their similar well-matched counterparts in 12 percentage points.

Contributors:
Anabela Carneiro
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Isabel Araújo

Additional information:
Portugal20_Araújo.pdf


Returns to postgraduate education: Holding on to a higher ground? Abstract: Postgraduates' relative wages are on the rise despite large increases in the number of workers with such qualifications. In this presentation, we propose an innovative way to measure the importance of different sources of the postgraduates' earnings premium in a

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context of rapid massification. Using an off-the-shelf non-parametric matching technique, we disentangle two different sources of postgraduates' relative earnings: wage premiums within occupations and the assignment to better paid and more complex occupations. We show that both sources are relevant but the relative importance of the former has been steadily increasing overtime. This evidence suggests that postgraduate degrees have largely worked as a way to avoid falling down the occupational ladder or, in other words, to hold on to a higher ground.

Contributors:
A. Almeida
M. Portela
J. Cerejeira
C. Braga
C. Sá
P. Teixeira
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Hugo Figueiredo
Universidade de Aveiro
12:15–1:00
Technical short presentations using Stata
Chair: Miguel Portela

Python applications in Stata 16 Abstract: Stata 16 has been recently released and one of its new features is the ability to embed and execute Python code from within Stata. In this prsentation, I present two simple applications that make use of this new feature. The first one, adrcheck, finds Google Maps'
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suggestions for addresses stored in a Stata variable. The second one, menuine, interfaces with INE's (Instituto Nacional de Estadística) API to get data from a vast list of indicators directly into Stata.
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Gustavo Iglésias
Banco de Portugal

Additional information:
Portugal20_Iglésias.pdf


Jupyter notebooks & Stata Abstract: Demonstration on how to use Jupyter Notebooks, a web-based interactive editor, to run Stata and writing simultaneously improving the workflow.

Miguel Portela
University of Minho

Additional information:
Portugal20_Portela.zip

2:00–3:00
Keynote speaker

Occupational sorting and wage gaps of refugees Abstract: Refugee workers start low and adjust slowly to the wages of comparable natives. The innovative approach in this study using unique Swedish employer-employee data is to show that the gap is mainly caused by occupational sorting into cognitive and manual tasks.
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Within occupations, it can be largely explained by differences in work experience, while the remaining gap might be caused by discrimination. The identification strategy relies on a control group of matched natives with the same characteristics as the refugees, using population-level panel data for 2003–2013 to capture unobserved heterogeneity.

Contributors:
Hans Lööf
Andreas Stephan
Klaus F. Zimmermann
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Kit Baum
Boston College
3:00–4:15
Session II: Empirical analysis using Stata
Chair: João Cerejeira

Tell me who you consult with and I'll tell you how compliant you are: Can physicians affect patient adherence? Abstract: Relying on a large longitudinal matched physician-prescription-patient dataset for all Portuguese e-prescriptions (SPMS, 2015-2017) we've extended the paper by Koulayev et al. (2017) which analyzes the contributions of doctor-specific, patient specific, and
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drug-specific factors to the adherence decision, now applied to hypoglycemic agents and their pharmacotherapeutic groups.

Contributors:
Nuno Sousa Pereira
Ricardo Vicente
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Joana Gomes da Costa

European funds and firm dynamics: Estimating spillovers from increased access Abstract: We take advantage of a quasi-natural experiment to assess the impact of European funds on firm dynamics in regions that, while not having their status changed, saw their neighbours increased access to European funds. Causality is established in a difference-in-differences
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intention to treat setting, using a rich dataset that considers the universe of Portuguese mainland municipalities from 2003 to 2010, and controlling for socio-economic, political and demographic variables. Our findings suggest a causal impact of between 1 and 2 percent in private sector firmsĀ“ entry and net entry r ates, while we find no impact on firm exit rates. We consider time and space placebos to assure the reliability of our estimates. Our findings suggest that EU regional funds have a greater impact in times of distress, such as the world economic crisis, as far as entry rates are concerned. The analysis of the cross-section of firm demonstrates it is domestic owned micro firms in the primary and tertiary sectors that are most impacted by regional funds.

Contributors:
José Tavares
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João Pereira dos Santos
NOVA SBE

Where or whom to contract? An empirical study of political spillovers in public procurement Abstract: A growing body of empirical research details how public procurement processes deviate from the competitive, efficient outcomes. In particular, municipal public procurement decisions are both affected by geographical proximity and political considerations.
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This presentation extends the analysis that by now has solely focused on single municipalities and poses the hypothesis they are also affected by political proximity. Specifically, it asks if there is a relation between the political parties in power in Portuguese municipalities and the frequency of contracts awarded to a given firm? We rely on a dataset ("base.gov") with information on all bids by private firms and all contracts awarded by the 308 Portuguese municipalities in the period between 2008 and 2017. This includes three electoral cycles and more than 250,000 contracts. Our results show that municipalities are more likely to award contracts to firms have won in other municipalities led by the same political party. This political proximity effect is robust to virtually all controls, including geographic proximity. This result has political and public governance implications.

Contributors:
Pedro Camões
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João Cerejeira
4:45–6:00
Technical short presentations using Stata
Chair: Paulo Guimarães

checkmd: Utility tool for database quality control checks Abstract: Quality control is of paramount importance in data management and sources of data contamination can be eliminated or flagged by using quality control techniques. In this presentation, we present a Stata community-contributed command
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checkmd that allows to examine logical conditions in the data. The command produces an HTML report with a description of each condition checked, including frequency tables of consistent and inconsistent values and lists of observations that have the most remarkable inconsistencies.
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Emma Szhao
BPLIM/BdP

validarcae: Utility tool to deal with the Portuguese classification of economic activities (CAE) Abstract: The Portuguese Classification of Economic Activities establishes the common categorical system to report economic activities in Portugal and suffered several revisions over time. In this presentation, I will present validarcae, a community-contributed
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Stata command that allows to validate the codes in a string or numerical variable reporting the economic activity according to the revision specified by the user. This tool also allows to obtain different types of aggregation for valid codes according to each revision.
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Marta Silva
BPLIM/BdP

Additional information:
Portugal20_Silva.pdf


ppmlhdfe: Fast Poisson estimation with high-dimensional fixed effects Abstract: pmlhdfe is a new Stata command for estimation of (pseudo) Poisson regression models with multiple high-dimensional fixed effects (HDFE). Estimation is implemented using a modified version of the iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS) algorithm that allows

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for fast estimation in the presence of HDFE. Since the code is built around the reghdfe package it has similar syntax and supports many of the same functionalities. ppmlhdfe also implements a novel and more robust approach to check for the existence of (pseudo) maximum likelihood estimates.

Contributors:
Sérgio Correia
Tom Zylkin
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Paulo Guimarães
Banco de Portugal

Additional information:
Portugal20_Guimarães.pdf

6:00
Open panel discussion with a Stata developer
Isabel Canette
StataCorp

Scientific committee

Miguel Portela
University of Minho
Anabela Carneiro
University of Porto
João Cerejeira
University of Minho
Paulo Guimarães
University of Porto and Bank of Portugal

Logistics organizer

The 2020 Portugal Stata Conference is jointly organized by Timberlake Consultants,
the distributor of Stata in Portugal, and the Faculdade de Economia da Universidade do Porto.

View the proceedings of previous Stata Conferences.