[Mor Zahavi]

Thanks. that's what I was looking for.

[Mor Zahavi]

Dear Musau,

I have encountered a further problem when numbers are very small.

MWE:

clear
input v1 v2
10000000000 3
1 3
3 3
end

estpost su v1 v2
eststo est_1
esttab est_1, cells("count(fmt(%12.0fc)) mean(fmt(%9.3g)) sd(fmt(%9.3g)) min(fmt(3)) max(fmt(3))")

[Nick Cox]

If a variable ranges from 1 to 10 billion, I wouldn't want to see every digit in a table, but there is scope to do it:

. di %9.3g 10000000000
 1.00e+10

. di %12.3g 10000000000
    1.00e+10

di %13.3g 10000000000
  10000000000

[Mor Zahavi]

Thanks Nick. What about very small numbers?

For instance:

di %13.3g 0.00000000001

[Nick Cox]

So, what is that you want? That 10 billion is shown as an integer with all zeros explicit and 1 in 100 billion is shown similarly in the same column of some output as 0.00000000001? I have to guess that is beyond any format provided with Stata -- and it also seems to imply that your column in the resulting table would need to be about 25 characters wide, unless you defy common standards of aligning numbers on the decimal point, or where it should be. Good luck in combining that readably with whatever else is going to be in your table.

More positively, a need to show both very big and very small numbers in the same column is precisely why scientific notation is useful.

esttab is an excellent command I never use so I can't add advice on whether or how it can be persuaded or coerced to do what you want.

It is known that users can't define formats, except by arranging for a string variable to be produced for output using their own combination of rules, which was my point earlier in the thread.

[Mor Zahavi]

Is there a format which rounds such a small number to zero?

[Andrew Musau]

See

help format

In particular

%g differs from %f in that (1) it decides how many digits to display to the right of
the decimal point, and (2) it will switch to a %e format if the number is too large or
too small.

Some possibilities are

di %13.11f 0.00000000001
di %13.0f 0.00000000001

Res.:

 di %13.11f 0.00000000001
0.00000000001

.
. di %13.0f 0.00000000001
            0

The good news is that esttab allows you to specify multiple display formats for results in the same column.

sysuse auto, clear
replace price= price*10000000
reg mpg weight disp price gear turn
esttab ., b(%9.3g %9.5g %9.0f %9.2f)

Res.:

. esttab ., b(%9.3g %9.5g %9.0f %9.2f)

----------------------------
                      (1)  
                      mpg  
----------------------------
weight            -.00525**
                  (-3.31)  

displacement     .0095914  
                   (0.82)  

price                  -0   
                  (-1.02)  

gear_ratio           0.93  
                   (0.57)  

turn                -0.20  
                  (-1.05)  

_cons               41.63***
                   (5.04)  
----------------------------
N                      74  
----------------------------
t statistics in parentheses
* p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001

.

where the last display format is used for the remainder of the coefficients that are unspecified. Of course, we could also have simply specified

esttab ., b(3 5 0 2)

[Mor Zahavi]

Thanks Andrew!