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Brief EViews Tutorial

Getting started .................................................................................................................................................. 1
Opening an Excel-file to workfile in EViews ...................................................................................................... 2
Generating a new variable ................................................................................................................................ 4
Command window and Quick menu ................................................................................................................. 4
Analyzing the data ............................................................................................................................................. 5
Graphs ............................................................................................................................................................... 6
Quick guide to estimating an equation in EViews ............................................................................................. 7

Getting started
Opening the EViews opens the starting window. White part is the command window.

In the menu bar of EViews, there is Help menu, from where you can find extremely extensive
manuals. Especially the User’s Guide is very useful and comprehensive, and it explains all functions
of EViews step-by-step.

You can access most of the EViews functionality via menus. Just browse through the menus, and find
the proper command. You will then be guided through several windows that prompt you for the
information required to perform the command. (EViews can be used by programming also, but it is
not taught in this course.)

EViews organizes data, graphs, output and so forth, as objects. Each of these objects can be copied,
saved, cut-and-pasted into other Windows programs, or used for further analysis.

There are many ways how data can be imported to EViews. We introduce how data can be imported
directly from Excel-file.
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Opening an Excel-file to workfile in EViews

From Moodle, you can find the Excel file Tutorial data.xlsx. Save the file e.g. to your home directory
or memory stick.

In EViews select File → Open → Foreign Data as Workfile and find the Excel file you just saved.
EViews will automatically recognize the Excel file and opens following 4-step data importing wizard:

At first step, you see the data that you are

importing. If you do not want to import all the
data from the file, you can customize the
imported range. When everything seems to be
as you wish, click Next.

At step 2, by default, EViews will treat every

header row as a Name field, but you can change
the row type for each header by selecting (or
specifying a custom value for) the attribute name.

When everything seems to be as you wish, click

Next.

At step 3, you can edit series if needed. E.g. if

you want to define some series to be date, select
the series, and select Date from Data type menu.

When you are ready, click Next.

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At step 4, you can e.g. define the structure for

the workfile. In this case, when we have cross-
sectional data, we select Unstructured /
Undated.

When you are ready, click Finish.

Choose No in opening window asking: “Link

imported series and alpha object(s) to external
source?”

When the importation is finished, do a cross-check with your raw data file. It is good to save the
workfile right away. (File → Save As…) Remember also to save your EViews workfile. Later on,
you can open the file in EViews from File → Open → EViews Workfile

In addition, it is always important to remember to save your work every now and then during the
working.

Notice that there are already two series in the workfile: c and resid. They stand for “constant” and
“residuals”. Every time you estimate something, c saves the intercept of the regression and resid
saves the residuals.

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Generating a new variable

Almost always, when you analyze data, you are required to somehow transform the raw data. You
can generate a new variable by clicking the Genr button on the workfile window and then inserting
the defining equation of your new variable.

Example: You have a variable of average income in your raw data, named avginc. You need to create
a logarithmic transformation of the income variable. You can create a new variable, loginc, which is
a natural logarithm of the existing variable avginc, as follows:

The most frequently used operators are + (addition), - (subtraction), * (multiplication), /

(division), ^ (exponentiation). Log(x) calculates the natural logarithm of x (see the above
example) and exp(x) computes the exponent of x.

When working with time series data, differences and lags (and leads) are frequently used:
d(variable) difference
variable(-1) variable lagged by one period
variable(+1) variable lead by one period

Command window and Quick menu

Many actions can be done more quickly in command window, instead of browsing through the menus.
For example, transformations are most easily specified there:

Type series loginc = log(avginc), which generates a new series loginc, the natural log of avginc.

If you don’t know or remember the name of the command, often the menu Quick contains the
procedure you need.

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Analyzing the data

Choose variables that you want to analyze. If you want to analyze one variable, choose it by double-
clicking it. If you want to analyze multiple variables at the same time, choose variables by clicking
their names while holding Ctrl. Then right click with the mouse and select Open → as Group.
From the View menu, you can find all kinds of tools for analyzing the data, e.g. following (NB. Menu
looks a bit different depending on whether you analyze one series or multiple series at the same time):
- Spreadsheet: ”raw” data
- Graph: different types of graphs
- Descriptive Statistics & Tests: Statistical tests, tables, etc.
- One-Way Tabulation / N-Way Tabulation
- Covariance Analysis: covariance and correlation matrices

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Graphs
Example 1. Line graph.

1. Select the variable avginc by double-clicking the series.

2. From View menu select Graph → Specific type: Line & Symbol (Default) → OK.

If you want, you can save the picture by

clicking Freeze button on the window, and
picture will be opened as Graph object. Then
you can edit the picture in Options menu and
save it by naming in with Name button.

Example 2. Scatterplot.

1. Select the variables read_scr and math_scr (hold Ctrl).

2. Click right-hand side button of your mouse, and select Open.
3. From View menu select Graph → Specific type: Scatter (fitted line can be obtained from
Details → Fit lines: Regression Line) → OK.

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Quick guide to estimating an equation in EViews

Open EViews workfile named Growth.xlsx (can be found in Moodle).

Suppose you need to estimate following equation: 𝑔𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑡ℎ𝑖 = 𝛽0 + 𝛽1 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑑𝑒𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑖

Select variables growth and tradeshare (hold Ctrl). Click right-hand side button of your mouse, and
select Open → as Equation.

In opening Equation Estimation window, in Specification sheet, you can modify equation if needed.

From Method menu, you can select estimation method (Least Squares as default).

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Heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors can be obtained from Options sheet by selecting Huber-
White from Covariance method menu.

When you are ready, select OK:

The results of the estimation: 𝑔𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑡ℎ𝑖 = 0.64 + 2.32 ∗ 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑑𝑒𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑖