Introduction

The Econometrics Laboratory is developing ELSA into a comprehensive public archive for econometric software. This archive holds portable code and supporting material for the computation required by econometric and statistical techniques. Both well-established and state-of-the-art methods are supported for a variety of the popular computing environments.

ELSA is supported by the Econometrics Laboratory and the National Science Foundation. Their goals are

• to make algorithms and methods from econometrics and statistics accessible to the research community quickly and accurately

• to foster collegial exchanges of work in progress

• to inform commercial software publishers about the priorities of the research community

• to encourage commercial publishers to incorporate state-of-the-art algorithms and econometric techniques in their products

Entries in ELSA satisfy guidelines, described in Submissions , that support these goals. The Econometrics Laboratory helps authors to meet these guidelines. A key feature of ELSA is the testing of code, where possible, so that users who download an entry should have a reasonable expectation that the test programs will run and will be relatively bug-free. For the computing platforms available at the Lab , users can be confident that the programs will run and the examples are replicable. We are at this time, however, a non-Mac facility, and one that supports PCs (DOS/Windows) on a fairly limited basis.

We encourage those who download and subsequently use results in classes or in a publication to give credit to the source author and to the source site (ELSA). Original submissions are the intellectual property of the author and the entire research community benefits from careful citation.

ELSA and the Econometrics Laboratory have no commercial interests in software publication. Although it attempts to check the accuracy and reliability of entries, the Laboratory does not guarantee the entries of ELSA in any way.

Paul A. Ruud

Last modification: 7 June 1995