My favorite overlooked life savers in Stata

Everyone loves a good testing, estimation, or graphical community contributed package. However, a successful empirical project relies on many small, overlooked but priceless programs. In this talk I will present three of my personal life savers. 1. adotools: adotools has four main uses. It allows the user to create and maintain a library of adopaths. Paths can be dynamically added to and removed from a running Stata session. When removing an ado-path, all ado-programs located in the folder are cleared from memory. adotools can also reset all user specified adopaths. 2. psimulate2: ever wanted to run Monte Carlo simulations in parallel? With psimulate2 you can and there are (almost) no setup costs at all. psimulate2 splits the number of repetitions into equal chunks, spreads them over multiple instances of Stata and reduces the time to run Monte Carlo simulations. It also allows macros to be returned and can save and append simulation results directly into a dta or frame. It can be run on Windows, Unix and Mac. 3. xtgetpca: Extracting principal components in panel data is common, however no Stata solution exists. xtgetpca fills this gap. It allows for different types of standardization, removal of fixed effects and unbalanced panels.