Re: st: Small Stata for teaching

["Brian P. Poi" <bpoi@stata.com>]

On Tue, 14 Aug 2007, Paulo Guimaraes wrote:

> 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.
Paulo,

We fully intend for Small Stata to be able to run most examples that are 
encountered in textbooks; an ARMAX model with 12 variables should be 
within the grasp of Small Stata.  If you send me (bpoi@stata.com) a 
do-file and dataset illustrating some of the examples that do not work 
with Small Stata, I will search for an alternative so that students can in 
fact do them.  I will also report back to statalist once we arrive at a 
solution.


   -- Brian Poi
   -- bpoi@stata.com
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