A seemingly bug with refcat (an option of estout), when using with tabstat ?

[Xiaocheng Liu]

Dear Statalist,

I am using esttab and tabstat to produce descriptive statistics of 4 variables. I intend to add a row indicating the name of by-category, since I want to append different categories in the same table. I use refcat to tell esttab where to add a row, but it does not seem to work as I expected.

sysuse auto,clear

recode length (100/150=1 "Less than 150")(151/200=2 "150-200")(200/250=3 "more than 200"), ///
generate(length_cat) 

eststo clear
eststo: estpost tabstat  price weight mpg,by(length_cat)
esttab ,cells("price weight mpg") refcat(1.length "Length category",nolabel)

The output is

. esttab ,cells("price weight mpg") refcat(1.length "Length category",nolabel)

---------------------------------------------------
                      (1)                          
                                                   
                    price       weight          mpg
---------------------------------------------------
Less tha~150         4261     1796.667     27.33333
150-200          5327.958     2677.708      23.3125
more tha~200     8161.043     3892.174     16.30435
Total            6165.257     3019.459      21.2973
---------------------------------------------------
N                      74                          
---------------------------------------------------

Clearly, It can not recognize "1.length" and didn't add the row I I want. However if I change the label of 1.length to a single word "Less_than_150" (If space is included, it will not work again), and use the label inside refcat, it does work. The problem is, I cannot label all my category variables with a single word.

recode length (100/150=1 "Less_than_150")(151/200=2 "150-200")(200/250=3 "more than 200"), ///
generate(length_cat2) 

eststo clear
eststo: estpost tabstat  price weight mpg,by(length_cat2)
esttab ,cells("price weight mpg") refcat("Less_than_150" "Length category",nolabel)

And the output is

. esttab ,cells("price weight mpg") refcat("Less_than_150" "Length category",nolabel)

---------------------------------------------------
                      (1)                          
                                                   
                    price       weight          mpg
---------------------------------------------------
Length cat~y                                       
Less_tha~150         4261     1796.667     27.33333
150-200          5327.958     2677.708      23.3125
more tha~200     8161.043     3892.174     16.30435
Total            6165.257     3019.459      21.2973
---------------------------------------------------
N                      74                          
---------------------------------------------------

Is it a bug with tabstat or refcat? What should I do with my long value labels?

[William Lisowski]

Does this approach help?

. esttab , cells("price weight mpg") posthead("Length category") 

---------------------------------------------------
                      (1)                          
                                                   
                    price       weight          mpg
Length category
Less tha~150         4261     1796.667     27.33333
150-200          5327.958     2677.708      23.3125
more tha~200     8161.043     3892.174     16.30435
Total            6165.257     3019.459      21.2973
---------------------------------------------------
N                      74                          
---------------------------------------------------

[Xiaocheng Liu]

Thanks a lot. it does help!