st: Small Stata for teaching

[Paulo Guimaraes <guimaraes@moore.sc.edu>]

Dear Statalisters,

I am sure some of you have taught statistics/econometrics courses using 
Stata and recommended that students buy Small Stata.
The advertised limitations for Small Stata do not seem too restrictive: 
a maximum of 99 variables, 39 right-hand variables, 1000 observations 
and a matsize of 40.
The course I am teaching is on economic forecasting. I am using the book
"Elements of Forecasting" by F. Diebold and contrary to the examples on 
the book (which are on Eviews) I decided to use Stata. Unfortunately, I 
am finding out that the students can not replicate some of the examples 
on the book because of the restrictions on Small Stata. For example, 
they are unable to estimate an ARMAX with 12 seasonal variables using 
400 observations. From the general description of Small Stata it never 
crossed my mind that they couldn't do it. This has been a frustrating 
experience as I am never sure what exactly are the limitations of Small 
Stata. I definitely would expect it to be able to run most "textbook 
examples" and I naively assumed that to be true.
For the next time that I teach the course I have to decide if I change 
the book or the software. I would like to know about your experiences
with Small Stata and if this also happens with other textbooks.


Paulo Guimaraes
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