EViews 5.1 Update Overview
We are very pleased to offer you a free upgrade from EViews 5.0 to EViews 5.1. The upgrade, which provides several new features and improvements to the existing program, is in part a response to user requests, and is in part a collection of features that were not completed in time for the release of EViews 5.0.
Some of these features, like the enhanced graph customization tools and Enterprise Edition support for EcoWin online data, represent significant improvements in the set of tools for working with your data. Other features, such as improved support for creating workfiles from identifiers, an enhanced copy command, and expanded testing in panel and pool estimation, are minor improvements to existing routines.
Overview of EViews 5.1 New Features
Graph Customization
EViews 5.1 features a greatly expanded set of tools for customizing graphics. These tools allow for added control over the graph area, frame, and background, font characteristics, axes, grid lines, and more. New default templates provide easy-to-use examples of graph customization, and can be used as the basis for user template creation.
Graph Appearance Settings
EViews 5.1 provides control over a wider range of graph appearance characteristics.
•You may now select graph background color, fill color, frame color, and frame thickness.
•Graph legends, and text object boxes, now feature user-specified fill color, frame color, and frame thickness.
•Font face, text color, and text style (bold, italic, underline, strikeout) choice has been extended to all text in graphs, including legend, axes, and text objects.
•Axes options allow for any combination of axes to be displayed with user-spec- ified line widths.
•Grid line characteristics (color, width, pattern) may now be specified by the user.
•The data portion of a graph may now be indented horizontally and/or vertically within the graph frame using user-selected increments.
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• The background color in a graph may now be printed and exported with the graph. Note that full command line support has been provided for all of the above features.
Improved Graph Template Support
Graph templates have been improved so that they control a wider range of appearance settings and are easier to use:
•Template support is provided for all of the new appearance settings.
•EViews now provides a set of predefined templates illustrating the use of basic display options such as background color, fill color, line/bar coloring, graph size, and grid line settings. The predefined templates, which include “Classic” (classic EViews), “Modern”, “Reverse”, “Midnight”, “Spartan”, and “Monochrome”, may be used as-is to modify the appearance of graphs, or may serve as the basis for further customization or template creation.
•Templates may now be applied to an existing graph via the main graph dialog, and may also be used to update graph defaults.
Enhanced Graphics Defaults
Major improvements in the setting and handling of graph defaults allow you to control the appearance of newly created graphs:
•Global defaults have been extended to support all of the new appearance settings.
•Both global and individual graph object defaults may be updated using templates.
•Individual defaults allow you to specify the settings for new text, line, and shade objects added to an existing graph object. For text, you may specify font options (font name, size, style, and color), and the fill and frame color to be used when the text is enclosed in a box. For lines or shades, you may specify color, width, and pattern.
Simply customize the appearance of a single graph, then instantly update your defaults so that new graphs will take on the desired appearance. Or, update the text and shade defaults in an existing graph, and subsequent new text and shade objects will use those settings.
Tools for Creating Workfile Pages from Identifiers
EViews 5 provides basic tools for creating a new workfile page from the unique values of one or more identifier series in a given workfile page. EViews 5.1 extends these tools to work with identifier series located in multiple pages, allowing you easily to create new pages structured using the values found in series or to form pages by crossing the unique
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values from two identifier series, or by crossing the unique values from a single identifier series with a date frequency and range.
You may use these tools to create a new workfile page from: (1) the union of unique ID values from one more more pages; (2) the intersection of unique ID values from mulitple pages; (3) the cross of the unique values of two ID series, or (4) the cross of a single ID series with a date range.
Panel and Pool Equation Specification Testing
EViews 5.1 provides upgraded support for specification testing in panel or pool equations estimation. The following tests have been added in the EViews 5.1 upgrade:
•LR-type testing for omitted or redundant regressors in panel and pool equations specified by list. The omitted variable test enables you to add a set of variables to an existing panel or pool equation, and to ask whether the set makes a significant contribution to explaining the variation in the dependent variable. The redundant variables test allows you to test for the statistical significance of a subset of the variables included in your panel or pool equation.
•Redundant fixed effects testing for panel and pool equations estimated by ordinary linear and nonlinear least squares evaluates the statistical significance of the estimated fixed effects.
•Hausman random effects testing evaluates the restriction that the random effects are uncorrelated with the explanatory variables. The test statistic evaluates the closeness of the coefficients from a random effects pool equation to the corresponding fixed effects specification.
EcoWin Database Support
EViews 5.1 Enterprise Edition now supports direct access to on-line EcoWin databases (www.ecowin.com). 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.
The EViews EcoWin interface provides the following features:
•An interactive graphical window attached to an EcoWin database allowing for browsing of series in the database, selection of series, and copying/exporting of series into an EViews workfile or another EViews database.
•A set of commands to perform tasks such as fetching a particular series by mnemonic from a selected EcoWin database. These tools may be used interactively or within EViews user-written programs.
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EcoWin support is provided through the addition of an EcoWin database type to the list of databases supported by EViews. Since access to EcoWin data is provided using standard EViews database tools, most of the user interface to EcoWin data will be familiar to EViews users.
Miscellaneous
Other features added in EViews 5.1 include:
•The copy command has been enhanced, and now supports copying objects between named workiles and workfile pages. If copying series into a workfile page, EViews allows for automatic frequency conversion and match merging of the data in the series to the new workfile page frequency or structure.
•An equation forecast option allows you to ignore coefficient uncertainty when computing the forecast standard error.
•ARCH equations now allow you to calculate conditional variances as well as conditional standard deviations. In addition, you may now display and save the permanent component of the GARCH conditional variances in component models.
•A new global option allows you to set the default maximum number of errors in program execution.
•The @cbvnorm and @dbvnorm functions have been added, allowing you to evaluate the cumultative distribution function and density function of the standardized bivariate normal distribution.