spaceship earth Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 Which software programs (or programing skills) are most common/useful for economics phd students? My first thoughts include statistical analysis packages & math programs: SPSS, SAS, MatLab, Mathematica, etc. Maybe excel too for basic stuff... Thought I'd check the thoughts of people here too. If you think it doesn't really matter, say why. Some obvious follow up questions might be: Does anyone use any open source versions of this type of software? Whats the best way to learn these programs? [to get comfortable with them before using them for a research project] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rthunder27 Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 One vote for Matlab Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
onetime Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 R is open source and is quite a powerful statistics package. And Matlab is quite useful. At my university, one can buy a student license for a pretty low price, so perhaps you should look into that. As for the best way to learn, I would just play around with it, using the help menus when you get stuck. Alternatively, I expect there are some notes for a course in Matlab (or whatever you decide to learn) publicly available somewhere. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oleador Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 To the best of my knowledge, for econometrics the most used software is Stata and R (open source). For more advanced stuff or/and programming econometrics "manually" MATLAB is often used. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
econchef Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 MATLAB is good for manual econometrics and useful for PhD metrics assignments if they want you to do a lot of bootstrap and montecarlo simulations by hand. For general purpose econometrics software my vote is with Stata. It has a strong community that makes the base software more useful and exporting output into latex and other publication programs is quite efficient. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tm_member Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 MATLAB is all we've needed so far to do whatever econometrics and dynamic programming we've been asked to do for problem sets. I can't imagine anything requiring more than Matlab at this stage of the second semester (5 weeks of classes to go... and then it's prelim study time) Also, what I would have found useful would have been to get familiar with LaTex. However, most of my classmates and I now use LyX which is just a great compromise to begin learning Tex. I now hand in all weekly problem sets fully typed even though this is strictly required only for our Macro class... it makes it a lot easier to review them and have them checked for errors by my classmates before handing them in. It's also pretty sweet when you get to copy and paste large chunks from prior homeworks into current homeworks which require similar processes and you can just edit and submit. I highly recommend it, and regret not typing all my first semester stuff, which is going to be much more difficult to review for prelims. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andronicus Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 What is most useful depends on your interests. For anyone but a theorist, either SAS or Stata skills are very important. SPSS is not so useful because it seems to focus much more on ANOVA methods used by other social scientists rather than multiple regression methods. It maybe okay for experimentalists (lots of experimental psychologists use it) but better to learn SAS or Stata. Matlab is certainly useful for macro and for doing econometrics that you can't find in canned SAS or Stata procedures. However, I personally have hardly used Matlab at all in my three years in a PhD program. Certainly everyone should learn how to use LaTeX for writing papers and making slides. Since I'm an experimentalist I'll give a shout out to z-tree, which is great for me but totally useless for anyone not doing experiments. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
delimitless Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 Here's a big shout out to R. I use it predominately in my work as an RA and find it very useful. It has effective tutorials that get you started with the basics. Because it's open-source, there are a lot of user-written packages and help documentation that you can locate just by googling. The fact that it's free doesn't hurt either. The one downside to R is that it's not very fast for large problems. Programs that operate at a more basic level like matlab or most notably Fortran are much faster. It just depends on what you want to be doing. If you are engaging in things like high dimension non-linear stochastic optimization, you'll probably want a faster program. The downside to these types of programs is that you will be writing many more lines of code and (Fortran especially) they are less intuitive. A symbolic interpreter like mathematica is beneficial in that it can take derivatives and solve difficult algebra. One open source manifestation of this type of software is Yacas; though I believe that no one is working on debugging it any longer. One effective method I've found for learning--beyond a very basic level--is to read a paper in which some computational step has been taken and try to duplicate the results. This has the added benefit of familiarizing yourself with some economic literature at the same time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EconForeThought Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 One vote for STATA and one for MATLAB. The latter is such a great program. Used for everything from econ to engineering. If you want another one, GAUSS. For optimization, GAMS is the standard. Regarding R. I tried for a long time to learn it, and I just can't. My roommate is an EE PhD student and can't even figure it out (he is a programming wiz). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thesparky Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 Agreed on R. If you need any sort of flexibility, Stata just won't suffice, and R has more packages for stats than Matlab afaik. A symbolic interpreter like mathematica is beneficial in that it can take derivatives and solve difficult algebra. One open source manifestation of this type of software is Yacas; though I believe that no one is working on debugging it any longer. Maxima is another free one (and they have a list of others on their website). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thommo Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 Stata or EViews, will come in handy for econometrics classes. R will come in handy for econometric research. Matlab can also be used for econometric research, although not as handy as R. Matlab can also come in handy for other parts of economics though. It is often used in Macro classes, and research. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harry Lime Posted March 4, 2011 Share Posted March 4, 2011 In 10 years all of the aforementioned languages will be long dead. Learn python. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AREStudentHopeful Posted March 4, 2011 Share Posted March 4, 2011 In 10 years all of the aforementioned languages will be long dead. Learn python. Python is actually very useful to learn if you're interested in anything related to spatial econometrics and you want to do the GIS programming yourself :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
For Liberty Posted March 4, 2011 Share Posted March 4, 2011 1 Vote: Stata 1 Vote: Matlab 1 Vote: LaTex Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hzzhangyu Posted March 4, 2011 Share Posted March 4, 2011 One effective method I've found for learning--beyond a very basic level--is to read a paper in which some computational step has been taken and try to duplicate the results. This has the added benefit of familiarizing yourself with some economic literature at the same time. Very nice advice! Could you name a few papers for me to get started? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MLE Posted March 4, 2011 Share Posted March 4, 2011 Very nice advice! Could you name a few papers for me to get started? You can also try searching google for a subject and software and see what you get. For example, I came across "Nonparametric and Semiparametric Methods in R" by Jeffery Racine when introducing myself to nonparametrics. Going through the example code given in the paper is a good way to introduce yourself to both the material and how to use R. This is kind of like what delimitless suggested, but Racine's paper is presented more pedagogically than most research papers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hzzhangyu Posted March 4, 2011 Share Posted March 4, 2011 You can also try searching google for a subject and software and see what you get. For example, I came across "Nonparametric and Semiparametric Methods in R" by Jeffery Racine when introducing myself to nonparametrics. Going through the example code given in the paper is a good way to introduce yourself to both the material and how to use R. This is kind of like what delimitless suggested, but Racine's paper is presented more pedagogically than most research papers. Thanks! definitely going to check out that one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tobias123 Posted March 4, 2011 Share Posted March 4, 2011 Anyone learning or using R should have a look at Rstudio, which is a very useful IDE for R. Runs in linux and windows. RStudio Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LoS Posted March 4, 2011 Share Posted March 4, 2011 Everyone's talking about Matlab, but it's actually a very expensive software! So, unless you have a very easy and unlimited access to your University servers, I strongly recommend using Octave. It's almost the same (well, maybe a bit rough in usage) but open source! On my side, I also use R, Stata and LaTeX extensively. Maxima is pretty handy for math classes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tm_member Posted March 4, 2011 Share Posted March 4, 2011 Matlab is indeed very expensive, I guess only current students can really get their hands on a legal copy. It's $5 for a yearly licence here at Pitt Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MLE Posted March 4, 2011 Share Posted March 4, 2011 I'm curious about post-graduation of a PhD program. I guess which software you use is up to personal preference if you're doing independent research at a university, but it seems like some non-academic jobs (e.g. federal reserve banks) favor commercial software such as SAS or STATA. Has anyone else noticed a non-academic job with a specific software preference? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ggoofer Posted March 4, 2011 Share Posted March 4, 2011 LaTeX! It is good to get in the habit early. I like TexnicCenter on Windows, Mac I am still not in love with anything. Don't know how this compares in popularity to Scientific Workplace. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
etoposido Posted March 4, 2011 Share Posted March 4, 2011 I think the software you choose depends on your needs. Unless you want to do all your codes, you can take advantage of different software for different purposes (If somene else already coded and posted, you minimize the likelihood of making mistakes). Here my two cents about software and uses: If you want to do Dynamic Macro you should devote time to improve your skills in Matlab or Gauss, but better in Fortran since is faster than all those, so it'll save you time at some point. For metrics I also believe depends on, if your research focus on cross-section/panel data models Stata is a friendly package, but for time series there are some other better, like E-views in case you need to filter series it provides you with several important tools or like RATS and its cointegration module named RATS and MALCOLM for SVAR or SVEC. I also know the code for VAR Switching models is in Ox language. S-Plus has a lot of routines for Financial Econometrics really really useful. However, I also discover every day in R the most useful tool, it seems like for everything that I have to do (with the few exceptions cited above) there exist a package (I'm not gonna list, 'cause they're many). I'd just add SAS to deal with huge datasets, but it's a really, really expensive software. Obviously Latex in any version (Lyx, Winedt or TexnikCenter) is a must for any phd student........ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eds Posted March 5, 2011 Share Posted March 5, 2011 Matlab and latex for sure.Knowledge of other statistical packages is a plus Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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