This column will focus on how to improve your fluency in Stata. Over the next issues we will look at Stata problems of intermediate size which turn out to be soluble with a few command lines. As an introduction, systematic ways of repeating the same or similar operations are surveyed to give one...

Functions in Stata take two main forms, built-in functions that are part of the executable and egen functions written in Stata's own language. These are surveyed, giving a variety of tips and tricks, and noting the large number of user-written egen functions available for download from the...

Data for people in a family, firms in a sector, or members of any kind of group are often analyzed using data for the other members in each group. Examples are the number of older children for each child in a family or the mean investment of other firms in the same year. Many such problems yield...

Apportionment methods are used to translate a set of positive natural numbers into a set of smaller natural numbers while keeping the proportions between the numbers very similar. The methods are used to allocate seats in a chamber proportionally to the number of votes for a party in an election...