In this presentation, I will investigate the determinants of property tax collection in Mexico. The tax is paid by all owners of land and dwellings in Mexico for the right of holding their properties, and is collected and managed by municipal authorities at the local level. This type of tax has...

Surveys such as the Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares (ENIGH, or the National Survey of Household Income and Expenditure) offer many opportunities for the design, estimation, and testing of applied models in social science. The ENIGH is also a valuable source of case studies...

Following the General Law of Social Development, the National Council of Evaluation of Social Development Policy (the acronym for its name in Spanish is CONEVAL) has the responsibility to establish the criteria to define, identify, and measure poverty in Mexico. To develop this assignment,...

In this presentation, I cover how to use the new factor variables features in Stata 11. Stata’s new factor variables notation allows you to identify categorical covariates as factor variables, provides a convenient notation for specifying indicator variables without having to generate them,...

In this talk, I introduce some improved programs for nonparametric smoothing that originally were written in a very simple manner. These updated ado-files are simple too, but they are more versatile and more “Stata-like” than the original versions. The ado-files include, for density traces,...

The display of data or of results often entails the preparation of a variety of table-like graphs showing both text labels and numeric values. I will present basic techniques, tips, and tricks using both official Stata and various user-written commands. The main message is that whenever graph...

In the summer of 2008, I had an opportunity to participate in the internship program at StataCorp. There I found that professional software development is much more than just programming. Programmers can learn a lot from the software development process at StataCorp. One of the projects I worked...

Sometimes one wants to model the effect of a variable as a nonlinear smooth curve. A convenient choice for such a curve is a restricted cubic spline. This option has existed in Stata for a while through user-written programs, but as of Stata 10, the mkspline command in combination with the cubic...

I discuss estimation of poverty measures from household survey data in Stata and show how to derive analytic standard errors that take into account survey design features. Where needed, standard errors are adjusted for the estimation of the poverty line as a fraction of the mean or median...

Stata’s matrix language, Mata, highlighted in Bill Gould’s Mata Matters columns in the Stata Journal, is very useful and powerful in its interactive mode. Stata users who write do-files or ado-files should gain an understanding of the Stata–Mata interface: how Mata may be called upon to do...