Chapter 4. EViews 5.1 EcoWin Database Support
EcoWin database support provides online access to economic and financial market data from EcoWin. The EcoWin Economic and Financial databases contain global international macroeconomic and financial data from more than 100 countries and multinational aggregates. Additional databases provide access to equities information and detailed country-specific information on earnings estimates, equities, funds, fixed income, and macroeconomics. For further information on EcoWin data and software, please contact EcoWin directly (http://www.ecowin.com).
EcoWin database access is only available in the Enterprise Edition of EViews 5.1.
With EViews Enterprise Edition, you can open an EViews window into an online EcoWin database. This window allows browsing and text search of the series in the database, selecting series, and copying/exporting series into an EViews workfile or another EViews database. In addition, EViews provides a set of commands that may be used to perform tasks such as fetching a particular series from a EcoWin database.
Access to EcoWin databases within EViews Enterprise Edition requires that the EcoWin Pro software has already been installed on the local machine, and that configuration of EcoWin database access using the EcoWin Database Configuration software has already been completed outside of EViews.
Interactive Graphical Interface
To open a graphical window to an EcoWin database, you should first open the Database Specification dialog by selecting File/Open/Database…from the main EViews menu. Next, choose
EcoWin Database in the Database/File Type combo, and enter the name of the online database as specified in the EcoWin Database Configuration software, typically “DEFAULT”.
Clicking on OK will open an empty
EViews database window. To access the EcoWin data, click on the Query–Select button in the database window toolbar. EViews will open a window containing a EcoWin Pro control for browsing and searching the online data. Note that may take a
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bit of time to initialize the EcoWin control. Once initialized, EViews will open the EcoWin Query window.
The EcoWin Query window provides you with two methods for selecting series to be brought into your EViews database.
First, you may use Tree View to browse a directory structure of the online
database. You should use the tree on the left to navigate to the directory of interest, then select series in the window on the right by clicking or control-clicking on the entry, or by clicking on the right-mouse button and choosing Select All. Once the desired series have been highlighted, click on OK to bring the selected data into your EViews database.
This procedure, first browsing to find a directory containing data of interest, selecting series, and thenclicking on OK to bring in data, can be performed multiple times, until a list of all the series that you wish to use has been accumulated within the EViews database window. At this point the EcoWin browse control can be closed using the Cancel button.
In place of browsing the tree structure of the database, you may elect to use text search to display a list of series in the database.
Click on the Text Search selection at the top of the dialog to change the dialog to the
Tips for Working with EcoWin Databases—61
search display, and enter the information in the appropriate fields. For example, to search for all series in the database using the text “PETROLEUM” and “US”, we have:
Highlight the series of interest and click on OK to bring them into the database. Repeat the tree browing or search method of adding series until the list in the database is complete, then click on Cancel to close the query window.
Once series of interest have been included in the database window, all of the standard EViews database tools, such as copy and paste into an existing workfile or database using the right mouse menus, creating a new EViews workfile containing the data using the Export button, or importing data into an existing EViews workfile using the Fetch menu item from the workfile window, are available.
Note that after you have completed your intitial query, you may reopen the EcoWin query window at any time. To add series to those already available in the database window, press the Query Append Select button in the database window, then browse or search for your series. To first clear the contents of the database window, you should press the Query Select button instead of the Query Append Select button.
Tips for Working with EcoWin Databases
If an EcoWin database is going to be used frequently or for direct access to individual series, you should find it useful to add an EcoWin entry in the database registry.
The EViews database registry may be accessed by choosing Options/Database Registry...
from the main EViews menu. Press Add New Entry to add a new database registry entry to the list. The procedure for adding an EcoWin database to the registry is identical to that for
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opening an EcoWin database. The Database/File Type field should be set to EcoWin Database and the Database Name/Path field should be filled with the name assigned to the database in the EcoWin Database Configuration software (generally “DEFAULT”).
Once the EcoWin database has been put in the registry, it may be referred to by its alias (short hand) name. For example, if you have assigned the EcoWin database the alias “EW”, you can open the database with the simple command:
dbopen ew
or by using the Browse Registry button in the Database Specification dialog. The database name “EW” will be added to the most recently used file list, where it may be selected at a later time to reopen the database.
Assigning the EcoWin database a shorthand name also allows you to reference data without explicitly opening the database. For example, the command
equation eq1.ls ew::usa09016 c ew:usa09016(-1) @trend
runs a regression of U.S. unemployment on an intercept, its own lagged value, and a time trend. The series USA09016 will be accessed directly from the EcoWin servers, and does not need to appear within acurrently open database window for this command to be used. Other commands such as copy allow the name associated with the series to be changed during the procedure, as well as supporting the copying of series directly from an EcoWin database to another EViews database.
show ew::usa09016
displays a table of U. S. unemployment.
Note that series in the EcoWin “Economic” or EcoWin “Financial” databases may be referenced merely by using the database shorthand and the series name. In the example above, EViews looks for USA09016 in the two base EcoWin databases.
Series located in add-on EcoWin databases such as “Bank of England”, “Bundesbank”,”Bureau of Economic Analysis”, must also provide the name of the add-on database in which the series is located. You should provide the name of the EcoWin shortcut followed by a double colon, an EcoWin add-on database prefix, a slash, and then the series name. For example, you can fetch the mortgage rate (LUM5WTL) in the Bank of England database with
fetch ew::boe\lum5wtl
where we follow the datbase name with the add-on name BOE. The series will be named “BOE\LUM5WTL” in EViews. Note that the add-on name BOE is taken from the EcoWin name prefix (for example, LUM5WTL appears as “BOE:LUM5WTL” within EcoWin.