Stata Basics

Because I know how frustrating it can be to get started learning a statistical package like Stata, I am making available some material that I used in a couple of training programs for first time Stata users. The first, and most recent, set is from a two-session introduction to Stata that I gave to participants in an African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) training workshop in May 2001 and again in May 2002. The second set comes from a short course for Nordic Ph.D. students in June 2000 in which the theme was poverty analysis. These latter materials include a brief introduction to Stata along with such applications as constructing a poverty line using the cost of basic needs (CBN) approach, estimating FGT poverty rates, and testing orders of stochastic dominance (CDFs, not Lorenz curves). Please keep in mind that these are not finely polished tutorials. Rather they are handouts that I made available for participants in the workshops. I hope that these are in some way helpful.

You will need Adobe’s Acrobat Reader to view the documents. This can be downloaded for free.

AERC Stata Introduction:

If you have the student version of Stata (limited to 1,000 observations), then you cannot use the datasets above. Here are the smaller versions of these datasets.  Note: I have not checked the outcome of using these smaller datasets for the exercises. The results may very well differ from what appear in documents. At least you have a chance to work with the data.

Nordic Short Course on Poverty: