Your Serial Number

Depending upon how you received your software, your serial number will be on the invoice or on a license agreement. After the software has been installed, the serial number will generally be visible at the top of the "About" box, and at the top of the Preferences dialog (on the File menu in Windows or UNIX, or the RATS menu on the Mac).

 

Contacting Estima Technical Support

If you have access to e-mail, this is probably the best way for you to obtain technical support. You can provide us with a copy of your program and data set, and other very specific information about the nature of your question. This makes it much easier for us to resolve the problem or question, and to provide detailed answers. We try to respond to questions within one business day.

 

Please be sure to use a descriptive subject line on your email. A message with a subject like "Please help" is all too likely to end up in a spam folder.

 

You can also contact us by calling the technical support number listed below. Technical support is available from Monday through Friday, 9 am to 5 pm US Central time (1500-2300 GMT).

 

When you contact technical support please be able to provide the following:

1.Your name. While this seems obvious, it’s remarkable how many questions come from [email protected] without any attempt to identify the sender. 100% of the time, the reply to such an email will be a request for your identity.

2.Your serial number, or, if you have unserialized software (trial or classroom), a description of where and when you got the software.

3.The product name and version number.

4.As much detail about your question as possible. In particular, if you are getting an error message you don’t understand, be sure to include that error message in your e-mail. RATS produces fairly detailed error messages, so providing the specifics of any errors you encounter will make it much easier for us to diagnose the problem. Ideally, we would like the program and data file if it’s about an error.

 

You can contact technical support at:

 

Statistical Questions

RATS has many capabilities which may be unfamiliar to some of you. If you decide to explore some new territory, we will be happy to steer you to some good references or to explain how RATS does particular computations. However, while we can help to clear up basic misunderstandings about the use of the RATS instructions, we cannot give involved statistics lessons. If you are interested in discovering new techniques, check the list of e-courses. These explain in considerable detail both the theory and implementation using RATS of many key statistical methods.

Can RATS Do ...?

Users often ask us whether or not RATS code exists for implementing a technique described in an econometrics paper that has caught their interest. In many cases, the answer is that such code does already exist. Make sure you check the main index in the User’s Guide. Also, check the examples (main set plus textbook and paper replications). Using Help—Find in Files and looking for a keyword for the technique or an author’s name is usually the quickest way to search the examples on your computer.

 

And we do “take requests” on a fairly regular basis by writing, or helping write, code for papers that users have asked about. We are most likely to work on papers that would be of general interest to the RATS user community. And we are much more likely to take up requests if the author(s) can provide both the data and the program(s) they used to produce the original results.
 

Having the original code (in whatever language was used) is extremely helpful, because papers often omit or are unclear about important empirical details, such as data transformations, sample ranges, and so on. Programming mistakes are also fairly common, and having the original code makes it possible to identify discrepancies between what a paper says, and what the accompanying code actually does. 

 

While access to the original programs is very helpful, access to the original data is usually essential. Without the data, it is usually impossible to know whether you have correctly reproduced the original technique, or to identify the source of any obvious differences in the results.

 

With rare exceptions, if the authors can’t even provide the original data used in the paper, we probably won’t have any interest in trying to reproduce the results (and we would question whether the paper is really of any use).

Bugs and Potential Bugs

In a program as complex as RATS, there are undoubtedly some bugs remaining. In addition, because RATS has many features of a programming language, it is quite possible for you to experience problems due to errors in your own code. The more complex your program, the more likely it is that the latter is true. If your program is not running correctly, you should do the following:

•Check carefully that you are using the proper syntax on the instruction(s) causing the problem. See the description here in the help.

•If you are doing extensive operations with loops and COMPUTE instructions, put in some debugging statements (DISPLAY and PRINT are the most useful for this) to see where things go awry.

•If, after all this, you have a strong suspicion that you have located a bug, contact Technical Support. If you have done a thorough job on the preceding steps, you can often ask a direct question such as “Is there a known bug in ....?”, and we may be able to give you a quick answer. If you have not been able to isolate the problem, we will almost certainly have to ask you to send us the input file and data and as much other information as you can supply.

The RATSletter

The RATSLetter is a newsletter for registered users. We distribute it once or twice a year. It includes new product announcements, answers to common questions, bug reports, tips on the use of the program, lists of contributed procedures, among others. Past newsletters can be read at

 

https://estima.com/resources_newsindx.shtml

 

Updates

We typically have a “major” update every two to three years, where we change the main version number and redo the documentation. Between these we have several “minor” updates, where we add features to the program, revise procedures, add new textbooks and paper replications, etc. Many of the most important features get added first in these minor updates since that’s when we do most of the programming. If you want to stay up-to-date automatically, we have update subscription programs where you pay in advance to receive the updates at one fixed rate. See

 

https://estima.com/ratsupdatesubs.shtml

 

The RATS Software Forum

We host a discussion forum on our website. Here, registered RATS users can exchange ideas, ask statistical and programming questions, share example code and procedures, and get answers to technical questions from Estima staff. We also frequently post new procedures and examples on the forum—the forum is typically the first place that these are posted. The link to the forum

is

 

https://estima.com/forum 

 

and this is a detailed description of how to use it.

 

If you ask a technical support question on the forum, please do not email the same question to Estima’s support email address, as this will lead to an unnecessary duplication of effort on our part. We are happy to provide support through either medium, but please choose one or the other.

 

Copyright © 2025 Thomas A. Doan