Computing and Data
Overview
Many faculty and graduate students conduct empirical analysis. This page briefly lists some resources available and provides links to on-line data sources and information about software used by members of the department.
The Datalab
Faculty and graduate students have access to the Social Science Datalab 24 hours a day.This computer lab is located one floor above the economics department in the Social and Behavioral Sciences building. The computer lab consists of 16 networked PCs (Pentium III-667; 256M of RAM; 20G hard drive; zip drive) equipped with stata,SAS,SPSS,Maple,Eview, Statistica, and Minitab as well as other statistical and office productivity software. Other resources include 4 HP laser printers,a scanner,and a CD writer.
The Datalab also houses a computer-equipped classroom with 25 PCs and an overhead projector. This classroom is convenient for courses requiring hands-on computer instruction and may be used by graduate students when it is not used for classes.
Finally, the Datalab also acts as the contact point for the university's membership in the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). ICPSR data sets are available on-line for easy access.
Unix Servers
In addition to unix machines administered by the University and used for hosting web pages, e-mail, etc., the Economics Department has access to two Unix Servers. The main faculty research computer is a Sun E420R four-processor server equipped with four gigabytes of RAM and over 100 gigabytes of disk space. Available software includes Fortran and C compilers, SAS, stata, Gauss, and Maple. Additionally, a Sun Ultra 1 is available for more limited use.
Software
The following links contain information about software which may be of interest to students and faculty. Some of the documentation from other Universities may contain information about running a particular package that may not be appropriate here. However, all of the basic tutorials about reading and writing data files and performing statistical and econometric analysis should be relevant.
Stata
- Stata Home Page
- Stata Technical Bulletins
- Stata Information from UCLA
- Stata Tutorial
-
Search for Stata Code at IDEAS
SAS
- SAS Home Page
- SAS Tutorial from the SAS Institute
- SAS Tutorial from the University of New Mexico
- SAS Manuals
SPSS
Fortran
- Numerical Recipies books (f77, f90, and c)
- Fortran Tutorials
- Sun Fortran 77 Language Reference
- Sun Fortran Programming Guide
- Sun Fortran User's Guide
- Sun Fortran Library Reference
- Sun Performance Library User's Guide
- Sun Numerical Computation Guide
- Sun dbx source code debugger User Guide
Gauss
- Gauss Home Page
- Gauss Programming for Econometricians and Financial Analysts
- Listing of Gauss Resources at American University
- Search for Gauss Code at IDEAS
IMSL
Maple
- Maple Home Page
- Maple Information at Indiana University
- Maple Information at Texas A&M
- Maple Information at The University of Texas
Other and Miscellaneous
Data On-Line
Micro Data Sets
- U.S. Census Data (Berkeley)
- U.S. Census Data (Minnesota)
- SIPP info at Penn State
- Consumer Expenditure Surveys
- Current Population Survey
- Health and Retirement Survey and AHEAD
- NLS
- Panel Study of Income Dynamics
- Survey of Income and Program Participation
