Do you use SAS or STATA? Why? I use SAS, and am (a) an experimentalist, and (b) old. Are those the relevant variables? Are there substantive differences in which is best for certain tasks, or is it just a matter of familiarity?
Do they play well together? Does anyone use them both in sequence (e.g., one for data manipulation, the other for statistics)?
What would you recommend to a doctoral student today?
If so, would you please consider sharing it with the world.
As an empiricist, I use both.
SAS seems to work better for data manipulation and STATA seemED to have more tests than SAS. But SAS has added many new tests. If I need to pick just one, that would be SAS. 
I’m in a SAS programming class right now. Our professor recommended using SAS for the data manipulation and possibly switching to STATA for the statistics.
I’ve had to use SAS, STATA, NCSS, and JMP for various classes. I almost always use SAS for my own projects. From my experience, SAS handles large datasets extremely well. It provides fairly easy, efficient data manipulations. Plus, it accepts SQL code. That’s important for the really nerdy folk like me
I think Choong-Yuel is right in that STATA provides a larger toolset, but they’re tools that most accounting researchers don’t use very frequently. I would have a hard time trading the data manipulation ease in SAS for a handful of tools I don’t really need.
I use SAS b/c i’m older than you. it is very very powerful for experimentalists. SPSS for experimentalists is not good, but many use it anyway.
SAS is easier and more efficient for data processing and data cleaning.
An extremely important omitted variable in explaining program usage is whether the data is pre-formatted.
CRSP, COMPUSTAT, and all WRDS data is SAS formatted.
Is there a transcript or recording of this roundtable discussion on PIR? Thanks!
Hello, I missed the roundtable discussion. Are the transcript or the presentation...
Lynn- Excellent summary. I really like your suggestions for potential academic research...
Lynn, Good post. And good questions raised. I agree that this is an interesting...
Dear sir, I hope your post will help me a lot in wring Statements of purpose...
Choong-Yuel Yoo @ KAIST
April 9th, 2010