st: avar question (was: new on ssc - avar)

["Schaffer, Mark E" <M.E.Schaffer@hw.ac.uk>]

Dear Statalisters:

Last month, Kit Baum and I made available a new Stata package, -avar-, and announced it on Statalist in the usual way (see below).

As you can see from the description, -avar- is basically a utility.  If you wanted to roll your own sandwich variance-covariance estimator, -avar- would be a convenient program for generating different sandwich fillings (robust, HAC, 2-way clustering, etc.).

To our surprise, in September, the first month up on SSC, -avar- was downloaded almost 3 thousand times (!), putting it at number 5 in the monthly list of top packages:

> Top 25 packages at SSC
> 
>         Sep 2013
>   Rank   # hits    Package       Author(s)
>   ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>   ...
>      5   2840.0    avar          Christopher F Baum, Mark E Schaffer

and we can't work out why.

Are there that many people out there who are rolling their own VCEs?  Is -avar- a useful teaching tool?  Did the description lead people to conclude (mistakenly) that -avar- would do all the work in generating a robust VCE of their choice?

Would be helpful to know where this unexpected demand is coming from - could influence how we and others think about what are useful Stata programs to develop in the future.

Kit & Mark


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-
> statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Schaffer, Mark E
> Sent: 04 September 2013 22:24
> To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
> Subject: st: new on ssc - avar
> 
> A new package, avar, is now available from SSC. avar is part of the ivreg2 suite
> of IV/GMM routines.
> 
> avar estimates the asymptotic variance S of (1/N)*Z'e, where Z is an NxL
> matrix of L variables, e is an Nxp matrix of p variables, and N is the sample
> size. Typically, S would be used to form a sandwich-type estimate of the
> variance of an estimator, where Z is a varlist of regressors or instruments, e is
> a varlist of residuals from one or more equations, and S is the "filling" of the
> sandwich variance estimator.
> 
> avar uses the same Mata library as ivreg2, ranktest, et al., and in effect
> provides a user-friendly front-end to the Mata routines used by these programs
> to calculate variants of S for single and multiple equations that are robust to
> various violations of the iid assumption, including heteroskedasticity,
> autocorrelation, 1- and 2-way clustering, common cross-panel disturbances,
> etc.  avar supports time-series and panel data.
> 
> Note: in its current implementation, avar uses listwise deletion.  This means it
> will use only observations for which there are no missing values in any of the
> variables in Z or e (similar to the behaviour of Stata's sureg).
> 
> Kit Baum
> Mark Schaffer
> 



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