RATS Programming Manual, 2nd Edition is an "e-book" which can be downloaded free of charge. It was written by Walter
Enders from the University of Alabama and Tom Doan of Estima. Walter is the author of Applied Econometric Time Series and the
RATS Handbook for Applied Econometric Time Series. Tom is the author of the RATS software itself.
2nd Edition Manual alone
Manual plus examples and data.
The programs were written for RATS v8 or later—many will work on v7 (and some on v6 and earlier), but the book is designed to
demonstrate best practices given the capabilities of RATS versions 8 and above.
The description that follows was provided by Prof. Enders for the first edition:
The idea for the RATS Programming Manual was born when I was invited to give an intensive two-day workshop on RATS at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Workshop participants all had advanced degrees in economics or statistics and most were comfortable with the standard features of RATS. Shortly after, I was invited to present a similar two-week mini-course at the Catholic University in Brasilia.
The RATS Programming Manual is intended for those who are already familiar with RATS. The level is geared to the applied econometrician conducting the type of research that is suitable for the professional journals. As such, the manual emphasizes the instructions and options that enable you to simplify repetitive tasks, write your own advanced programs and procedures, and work with vectors and matrices.
Let me borrow a few sentences from the first chapter. I tell my students that state-of-the-art research requires them to go "off the menu." I'm being a bit facetious, but by the time a procedure is on the menu of an econometric software package, it's not new. This book is especially for those of you who want to start the process of "going off the menu."
This is the Preface from the 2nd edition:
This is an update of the RATS Programming Manual written in 2003 by Walter Enders. That was, and this is, a free “e-book” designed to help you learn better how to use the more advanced features of RATS. Much has changed with RATS over the intervening ten years. It has new data types, more flexible graphics and report-building capabilities, many new and improved procedures, countless new example files.
And the practice of econometrics has changed as well. It’s much more common (and almost expected) to use more “computational intensive” methods, such as simulations and bootstrapping, sample stability analysis, etc. These techniques will often require use of programming beyond the “pre-packaged” instructions and procedures, and that’s what this e-book is here to explain. The econometrics used in the illustrations is drawn from Enders, Applied Econometric Time Series, but there is no direct connection between the content of this e-book and the textbook. If you have questions about the underlying statistical methods, that book would be your best reference.
Because the goal is to help you understand how to put together usable programs, we’ve included the full text of each example in this book. And the running examples are also available as separate files.