st: Three new packages: labcenswdi - spseudor2 - and hlp2html available for download from SSC

["P. Wilner Jeanty" <pwjeanty@gmail.com>]

Dear All,

Thanks to Kit Baum, three new packages, -labcenswdi-, -spseudor2-, and
-hlp2html-, are now available for download from SSC.

-labcenswdi- manages automatically datasets extracted from databases
providing variable descriptions on the second row. Such databases
include, but not limited to, the World Development Indicators (WDI),
the US Census 2000 Summary Files, and the American Community Survey.
-labcenswdi- gets its name after two of these three databases. While
renaming variables with the user's specified variable names,
-labcenswdi- manages the variable descriptions including removing them
from the second row to place them into Stata variable labels, reducing
their length to 80 characters or less, and saving them to a text file.
The new variable names should be supplied in newvarlist (see syntax)
if the user elects to replace the original variable names with more
meaningful names.

Note that WDI datasets to be used by -labcenswdi- must be extracted in
long form with countries or time in rows and series in columns. Such
datasets are not to be reshaped. But, you might be wondering how
-labcenswdi- differs from -wdireshape-. The former does not outdate
nor supersede the latter. If your desired data structure is that of a
panel, then extract WDI data in a form to be used by -labcenswdi-.
Otherwise, extract the data in a form to be used by -wdireshape- .
Remember that -wdireshape-requires that you extract WDI data with
series or countries in rows and time in columns.

-spseudor2- calculates two so-called pseudo R2 measures to assess
goodness of fit in spatial autoregressive models estimated by spatial
two stage least squares or spatial GMM. The first measure is computed
as the square of the coefficient of correlation between the predicted
and observed values of the dependent variable. The other measure is
calculated as the ratio of the variance of the predicted values to the
variance of the observed values of the dependent variable.  In
calculating the predicted values of the dependent variable,
-spseudor2- takes into account the fact that the spatially lagged
dependent variable is endogenous. -spseudor2- is intended to work
after -ivregress- and -ivreg29- and requires at least Stata 10.1.

-hlp2html- converts a list of Stata help files to html format and
relies heavily on -log2html- written by Baum, Cox, and Rising to
provide you with more options.  Thus, -log2html- must be installed for
- hlp2html- to work. If you know the names of a few help files you
want to convert, you can just list them using the -fnames()- option.
However, you might want Stata to find help files from a folder,
convert them to html format, and save the html files to a another
folder. For example, if you want to convert all help files located in
the C:\ado\plus\s folder (in Windows platform) and place the html
files in a folder called C:\data\html, you code:

// Begin code

mata:
mkdir("C:\data\html");  chdir("C:\data\html")
hlpfiles= dir("C:\ado\plus\s", "files", "*.*hlp"); cmdnames =
substr(hlpfiles, 1, (strpos(hlpfiles,".") :- 1))
for (j=1; j<=rows(cmdnames); j++) {
stata("quietly hlp2html, fnames(" + cmdnames[j]+ ")  erase
scheme(black)") // you can add more options here
}
end

// End code

Regards,

Wilner

------------------------------
P. Wilner Jeanty
Research Economist
Dept. of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics
The Ohio State University
2120 Fyffe Road
Columbus, Ohio 43210
(614) 292-6382 (Office)
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