Creating Publication-Quality Tables in Stata
Stata's tables are, in general, clear and informative. However, they are not in the format or of the aesthetic quality normally used in publications. Several Stata users have written programs that create publication-quality tables. This article will discuss esttab (think "estimates table") by Ben Jann. The esttab command takes the results of previous estimation or other commands, puts them in a publication-quality table, and then saves that table in a format you cause use directly in your paper such as RTF or LaTeX. Major topics for this article include creating tables of regression results, tables of summary statistics, and frequency tables.
The estout Package
The esttab command is just one member of a family of commands, or package, called estout. In fact, esttab is just a "wrapper" for a command called estout. The estout command gives you full control over the table to be created, but flexibility requires complexity and estout is fairly difficult to use. The esttab command runs estout for you and handles many of the details estout requires, allowing you to create the most common tables relatively easily. We will also discuss estpost, which puts results like summary statistics in a form esttab can work with. The ability to handle summary statistics and frequencies in addition to regression results is one of the reasons we elected to focus this article on esttab.
