StataCorp Stata 14.2 (Revision 19 Dec 2017)

- Community-contributed command dataex, which generates properly formatted data examples for Statalist, is now being distributed with official Stata for the convenience of anyone who wishes to post data on Statalist.
- areg, when fitting a model with the absorb() variable specified among the indepvars and with option vce(cluster clustvar) where clustvar is a variable other than the absorb() variable, incorrectly exited with error message "not sorted". This has been fixed.
- predict with option ystar, ystar(a,b), or e(a,b) after churdle exponential produced incorrect results. This has been fixed.
The difference between the old and the new results is negligible when the values of the dependent variable are large, such as 100 or larger in our experiments. Large values of the dependent variable are typical with exponential mean models. However, in the rare case where the dependent variable is small, differences between old and new predictions may be larger; in our experiments, the change was at most 6%.
- esize twosample, when a string variable was specified in option by(), incorrectly exited with an uninformative error message. This has been fixed.
- gsem, when fitting a model with both endogenous and exogenous latent variables and with an interaction term containing a latent variable, exited with an uninformative error message. gsem now fits the model as specified.
- gsem, when option capslatent was specified or implied, ignored variables in the model if their first letter was a capital letter. Now gsem recognizes those variables as latent variables.
- margins has the following improvement and fixes:
. margins has improved numerical derivatives logic for computing the Jacobian matrix.
. margins with option asbalanced, when working with estimation results from ordinal outcome models like ologit and oprobit and when a factor variable was not among the marginsvars, incorrectly exited with error message "not conformable". This has been fixed.
. margins with option pwcompare, when used to compute margins for two or more interaction terms that involved the same number of factor variables, incorrectly computed the values of the margins. This has been fixed.
- marginsplot, when plotting marginal effects of multiple factor variables in options dydx() and eydx(), has improved spacing of the x-axis scale.
- melogit and mepoisson with option intmethod(laplace}, when used to fit a two-level model, may not have converged when the model could have been identified. This has been fixed.
- Prefix command mfp used with intreg incorrectly dropped all left- or right-censored observations from the estimation sample. mfp now keeps these observations.
- ml with method d1debug or method d2debug, when the specified model contained factor variables, exited with error message "could not calculate numerical derivatives". This has been fixed.
- predict after logit and probit, when the fitted model omitted the base level of a factor variable because it was a perfect predictor, did not properly assign missing values to the predictions according to the information in the matrix e(rules). This has been fixed.
- putexcel ul_cell=picture(filename) gave an error if you used compound quotes around filename. This has been fixed.
- pwcorr has the following fixes:
. pwcorr with no observations and only two variables specified, incorrectly stored r(rho) as 0. It now exits with error message "no observations".
. pwcorr with no observations for the first two variables and more than two variables specified, incorrectly stored r(rho) as 0. It now correctly stores r(rho) as missing.
- stcox, when specified with option shared() and variable names in indepvars that exceeded the default 12-character width for the table, produced a coefficient table with misaligned elements in the row for the theta parameter estimate. This has been fixed.
- stepwise with options lockterm1 and lr and forward selection or forward stepwise selection computed likelihood ratios at the first addition step by comparing each model with an additional term with an empty model rather than with the model that includes the forced first term. Thus, terms could be added to the model that did not satisfy the specified significance level for inclusion. This has been fixed.
- xtile, altdef failed to use the alternative formula for calculating percentiles and instead calculated them using the default formula. This has been fixed.
- Edit > Copy Table could omit the minus sign from negative numbers if they were in the first cell of a row being copied. This has been fixed.
- (Mac) macOS 10.13 introduced a change that caused Stata's Data Editor to crash when used with an if expression. This has been fixed.