New in Rats 9

• The online help feature has been completely revised. It now has the full content of the Reference Manual, with some important extras: over 100 of the most important procedures with a full description of syntax and examples. It is also fully linked up with cross-references for ease of use.
• The GARCH wizard has been split into separate wizards for univariate and multivariate models. A new wizard for handling estimation of cointegration models provides easy-to-use access to the @JOHMLE, @FM and @SWDOLS procedures.
• File-Properties shows the full file name of an open file (in a form where you can easily copy and paste). This can be handy when you have long paths so the name gets truncated.
• Help-News... gets a "news feed" off our web site with links to updated information.
• With version 8.3, we replaced the editor which actually runs most of the program with a new public domain editor called Scintilla. This adds the ability to put markers at locations in your program and includes "regular expressions" for more sophisticated searches. A few oddities in its operation (particularly skipping lines if you hold down the Enter key) have been corrected with version 9.
• Another important change with v8.3 that’s even better with v9 is Find in Files. This allows you to search for a string (or "regular expression") across the full set of example programs so you can quickly locate example programs that use DLM or do a BEKK GARCH or an SPGRAPH,etc. It gives a huge boost to your productivity.

• The most important change to the program itself is that you can now pass functions as parameters and options.This was a big hole in the RATS programming language–we haven’t even begun to figure out all the things that will be made easier or (even) possible using this.
• We introduced the HASH and LIST aggregators with version 8.2, but with version 9, we’ve added enough support to these to make them truly useful. These have been added to the documentation and examples of their use is now included.
• The diagnostics for attempts to access out-of-range array elements have been improved, pointing you towards the likely source. You also now get better information about mistyped identifiers, as the program will list possible near-matches.

• You can now write data to XLSX and not just XLS. This applies to any instruction which writes data and to the export operations from REPORT windows.
• SPGRAPH can now put keys out the outside of a matrix of graphs.
• The GARCH instruction adds the new option VARIANCES=KOUTMOS to compute the univariatevariances for cc and dcc models using the egarch formulation from Koutmos(1996) "Modeling the Dynamic Interdependence of Major European Stock Markets", Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, vol 23, 975-988. It also adds the STDRESIDS option for computing standardized residuals (univariate or jointly standardized multivariate).
• IMPULSE has a new FLATTEN option for more easily saving into %%RESPONSES in Monte Carlo methods. Its FACTOR option can accept reduced numbers of columns (shocks), which makes it easier to handle situations where you are particularly interested in only a subset of the structural shocks.
• HEIGHT and WIDTH have been added to GRPARM to allow standardized sizing of graphs.
• GRAPH has a new SERIES option which can take a VECTOR of SERIES or a VECT[INTEGER] with series handles as input. This is particularly handy for doing graphics in Vector Autoregressions, where the number of graphs needed can change from application to application.
• The DATA instruction adds the new option ORG=MULTILINE which allows you to pull data out of a spreadsheet file when a particular series occupies a block of rows.

Copyright © 2015 Estima