Open-source tools for Stata apostates.
Stata is the dominant platform in applied microeconomics. Many of the field’s most-cited econometric methods — ivreg2, reghdfe, xtabond2 — are implemented as user-contributed packages. These packages are open-source in a frustrating sense: the source code is freely available, but it can only be executed inside Stata, which requires a commercial licence. The community contributes the value; the platform captures the rent.
This creates barriers to reproducibility (verifying published research requires a licence), scalability (large-scale computational work requires per-core Stata/MP licences), and access (researchers at less-resourced institutions are locked out).
restatr aims to provide open-source R implementations of the most important Stata commands for applied econometrics, validated for numerical equivalence against the originals.
The first package is ivreg2r, an R implementation of Stata’s ivreg2 for IV/GMM estimation with flexible variance-covariance estimation. It is currently under active development.