Econometrics Laboratory Current Stat./Math. Software

Most users at the lab seem to give heavy use to only a handful of software packages. The first in the list is Splus, of which we run version 5.x on both our Linux Machine (Galton) and recently on the solaris machines. Second on the list is probably the STATA package, of which version 5.0 is available in our solaris machines. Version 6.0 was installed on the PCs. For those of us that do a lot of from-scratch programming, OX has become fairly popular for being very fast and fairly intuitive (being basically a dialect of C++). Version 2.1x is installed on both the solaris machines and our Linux machine. We have recently jumped on the R train and have been experimenting with it in our Linux machine... it is a very nice (and free!) implementation of the splus languaje with (hopefully) few of the drawbacks of the official Splus product.

We also have a number of other packages available for the specialized needs of some of our users. Among others, these include Mathematica in our solaris machines, MATLAB (through the AIX machine of George Deltas) and LimDep, GAUSS and RATS in our PC machines. We are in the continuous process of considering new software acquisition, and if you have suggestions along this line please send me an email at novo@uiuc.edu.

Other Software

Most of us use LaTeX to write up our work and all our machines offer a wide range of LaTeX and TeX related software. Alog this same lines, we have had for a while a fully functional version of Adobe Acrobat, which lets us translate ("distill") our .ps files into .pdf files. For the brave few that engage in general-purpose programming, we have a number of compilers available and other programming related tools. Some of these are f77, c, c++, perl, and java.

Some useful info about our software

Some notes on making OX work properly.

Some notes on making Mathematica work properly.

Some notes on using LaTeX.

Send comments and suggestions to novo@uiuc.edu

- Last updated on August 9, 1999. This page is now mantained by Roger Koenker and Alvaro Novo-