Universal and Mass Customization of Tables in Stata Roy Wada University of Illinois at Chicago

Purpose of this presentation: Strong demand for universal approach to systematic table-making in Stata Strangest advice seems to be coming from people with no background in empirical research Latest vaporware features in outreg2

Recent complaints about table-making “With eight dimensions it is difficult to see how any program could cope with line lengths ~ 100 (rather than say ~ 1000) and not produce an awful mess one way or the other.” - Tue, 21 Apr 2009 “But there is a point where it no longer makes sense for official Stata or ssc contributions to support complicated structures that are only needed every once in a while...” - Wed, 11 Nov 2009 “Stata has *no* ability to do this (though I assume one could program it, but I doubt it would be easy)” - Thu, 13 Jan 2011

Universal table-making There is no important difference between various types of tables – Regression tables & summary statistics are merged on conditions (happens to be variable names) – Cross-tabulation (Stub-and-Banner) Tabulation is merely conditional counting Cross-tabulation is a conditional counting merged on conditions Stub-and-Banner happens to be a particular type of conditional counting

Mass customization “Mass customization … is the use of flexible computer-aided manufacturing systems to produce custom output” (Wikipedia 07/14/2011) A solution was to do it column by column (the original outreg by John Gallup), which had been criticized as somehow nontechnical or outdated

Some issues with previous efforts Many good programs exist (outreg, estout, parmest, xml_tab, tabout, etc) General commentary: – Rube-Goldberg syndrome – over-engineered non- solutions for performing “simple” tasks – Mata-based programs are expensive and generally not extensive nor easily upgraded – Wrapper-based programs suffer from the existential question, i.e. then why didn’t Stata Corporation do it that way – Some programs were clearly designed by people with no background in empirical research

Desirable functionality What researchers wanted was quantity of tables, not quality (hundreds of regressions per day) Rarely for publication purposes (they don’t get published) Exact formatting often gets destroyed by the journal type-setters anyway Excel is a fact of life – virtually every researcher uses it LaTeX is not that popular – just look at the working papers floating around, clearly something else

Latest vaporware in outreg2 Already does cross-tabulation Extending it to including summary stats is straightforward Sideway-tranpose operation doubles the type of table format Some minor tweaks and bug fixes Probably by the beginning of August 2011

Terms of use (fair use) outreg2 implements tasks previously unknown in Stata or described nearly impossible. It is provided as a professional courtesy. I strongly object to re-publication this work of under false pretense Plagiarism is unethical, unprofessional, and academically dishonest, and egregious cases should be publicized as a deterrent.