Should Economists Use Open Source Software for Doing Research?

A. Talha Yalta and A. Yasemin Yalta
Additional contact information
A. Yasemin Yalta: Hacettepe University, Department of Economics
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Ayse Yasemin Yalta

No 20127, Hacettepe University Department of Economics Working Papers from Hacettepe University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We survey the literature on the accuracy of econometric software. We also assess the advantages of open source software from the point of view of reliability and discuss its potential in applied economics, which has now become fully dependent on computers. As a case study, we apply various accuracy tests on gretl (GNU Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library) and demonstrate that the open source nature of the program made it possible to see the cause, facilitated a rapid fix, and enabled verifying the correction of a number of flaws that we uncovered. We also run the same tests on four widely-used proprietary econometric packages and observe the known accuracy errors that remained uncorrected for more than five years.

Keywords: Open source; Econometric software; gretl; Accuracy; Software reliability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-ipr and nep-pr~
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iktisat.hacettepe.edu.tr/WP/WP-2012-7.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.iktisat.hacettepe.edu.tr:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Journal Article: Should Economists Use Open Source Software for Doing Research? (2010)
Working Paper: Should Economists Use Open Source Software for Doing Research? (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hac:hacwop:20127

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Hacettepe University Department of Economics Working Papers from Hacettepe University, Department of Economics Hacettepe University, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Department of Economics, Ankara, Turkey. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Aysen Arac ().