st: Wish List for margins

[Richard Williams <richardwilliams.ndu@gmail.com>]

I'm forcing myself to use the -margins- command and I am starting to 
like and understand it better. Some things I'd like to see (or else 
maybe somebody can tell me how to do them already):

* I'd like a -discrete- option that would tell margins to treat a 0/1 
dichotomy as a dichotomy. This would make margins more useful with 
older user-written commands (like mine) that do not currently support 
the use of factor variables.

* Perhaps the syntax would be tricky, but I am a little surprised 
there isn't a generate option. The old adjust command has one. You 
might want to see, say, what the predicted probability for a case is 
given the values you have fixed using the -at- option.

* As far as I can tell, marginal effects after multiple-outcome 
commands are still clunky to generate. You have to give a separate 
margins command for each outcome. I wish margins acted like the 
user-written mfx2 and margeff commands, generating all the marginal 
effects for every outcome with a single command.

* Like I've said before, I wish the old adjust and mfx commands had 
been updated for Stata 11. One thing they would need added is an 
-asobserved- option, which is the default for margins. At 50 pages, 
the manual entry for margins is a little daunting.  I think it would 
be easier to understand if there were simpler commands that focused 
on specific tasks.

-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
OFFICE: (574)631-6668, (574)631-6463
HOME:   (574)289-5227
EMAIL:  Richard.A.Williams.5@ND.Edu
WWW:    http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam

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