Facilities
Center for Applied Research in Economics
The Center's primary purpose is to facilitate empirical research by graduate students and faculty. To that end it maintains a Local Area Network of Pentium-Pro based computers, each of which has access to a server. GAUSS, STATA, Mathematica, and various word-processing and spreadsheet programs are installed on the server. The machines are available for student use 24 hours a day, seven days a week, require relatively little prior knowledge to use, and are compatible with the most widely-used platforms in academics, government, and business.
The Center maintains a number of data bases for use by both students and professors in their research and coursework. Various household data sets such as National Longitudinal Surveys, Current Population Surveys, and international data bases describing developing countries are included. The Center also publishes a series of Working Papers that allow for widespread dissemination of faculty and advanced student research.
Computer Facilities
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Below are some help documents about how to use department computer resources. "Econ Computer Resources Guide" contains general information about most of our resources. The rest of the files contains information about specific topics.
The information technology environment within the department contains many unique applications, hosts, software libraries, and access methods through two computer laboratories. The main laboratory offers both Windows and Unix-based operating systems. Primary research computing is done on Sun servers. These servers run the Solaris operating system (Unix-based) and offer applications such as MATLAB, Mathematica, SAS, SSH, GAMS, Stata, Gauss etc. They also support a lab of 25 Sun Ray workstations. Most storage, memory, and processing for these workstations occur across a private LAN on a server, but users have their own desktops and processing environments.
Windows operating systems are also available in a second 12-station laboratory in the department. One can access all the applications that the Sun servers provide, plus typical office applications in the windows environment. The department has wireless access via UT network as well.
Downloadable Resource Guides
- Econ Computer Resources Guide (PDF, 76K)
A brief introduction about all our resources - Introduction to Unix (118K)
Describes how to manage basic operations in Unix operating system with examples - Crisp (PDF, 14K)
Explains how to use the editor software Crisp on the Unix system. - Job_batch (PDF, 66K)
Basic instructions about how to compute in the batch mode and in the background - Care Lab Unix Access (11K)
How to access the department servers from the Care Lab
Related Resources on Campus and Around Austin
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The Department is an active participant in the University's area study programs for Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Graduate students have access to the research facilities of centers across the University, including:
- Institute of Latin American Studies
- Bureau of Business Research
- Population Research Center
- Johnson Presidential Library
- Benson Latin American Collection
- Texas History Center
- Documents Collection (depository for publications of the U.S. government, other nations, and the United Nations).
The research facilities of Austin include the state government offices, regional offices of federal agencies including the IRS, and the offices of many research institutions.
