Michael Stepner

I've written and published a variety of Stata programs, which anyone can install and use. They have been incredibly useful in my own work, and are now being used by thousands of researchers.

binscatter.ado

binscatter is a Stata program which generates binned scatterplots. These are a convenient way of observing the relationship between two variables, or visualizing OLS regressions. They are especially useful when working with large datasets.

maptile.ado

maptile provides a simple method for mapping a variable in Stata. It divides the areas on the map into groups and shades them according to the value of the variable being plotted. The map is drawn using a geography template, which are easy to create and share with others.

vam.ado

vam uses student-level scores to compute teacher value-added measures, applying the estimation procedure from Chetty, Friedman, Rockoff (2013). Each teacher's value-added is not assumed to be fixed over time: drift is accounted for by permitting the coefficients on score data from different years to vary non-parametrically.

fastxtile.ado

fastxtile is a drop-in replacement for Stata's built-in command xtile. It has the same syntax and produces identical results, but runs substantially faster in large datasets. fastxtile also has a few added features.

mergepoly.ado (with Robert Picard)

mergepoly takes a mapping shapefile and merges adjacent polygons by removing shared borders. For example, it can be used to transform a map file describing the U.S. states into a map file for the nine U.S. census divisions.