Below are some of the highlights of RATS 7.0 (released in 2007). See the October, 2007 RATSletter. See RATS: Latest Release for details on the current release, RATS Updates for information about updating your RATS software or RATS Information and Features for general information on RATS.

  • New and Improved Wizards: RATS now offers more than two dozen menu- and dialog-driven "Wizards", providing point-and-click interfaces for everything from reading in data to estimating and analyzing VAR models. Many of the existing Wizards are now more powerful and easier to use.

  • Improved Graphics: Version 7 provides better looking graphs, and gives the user much more control over graph appearance.

  • New DSGE instruction: DSGE (for Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models) analyzes linear and non-linear models with expectational terms, solving for a set of matrices which can be input into the DLM (state space model) instruction.

  • More IV/GMM Support: The four "least squares" instructions (LINREG and NLLS for single equations, SUR and NLSYSTEM for systems) now have a common set of options for handling GMM estimation in a more flexible way, including choice of method for updating the weight matrices. The biggest change here is the addition of GMM capabilities to SUR (Seemingly Unrelated Regressions).

  • New Functions: Version 7 adds thirty new built-in functions, bringing the total of new functions added since version 6.0 to almost ninety.

  • New Manuals: The revised RATS 7 manuals document all of the new features and changes introduced in Version 7, as well as those that appeared in incremental updates released since Version 6.0.

  • Simplified Syntax: Version 7 introduces a streamlined syntax for many instructions, with easy-to-remember options replacing longer lists of parameters. Note, however, that we still support the older syntax—RATS is largely backwards compatible to Version 4.

If you haven't been keeping up to date with RATS, you'll be surprised by all of the changes we've made in recent years. Version 7 is actually the 7th update to RATS since Version 6.0 was released back in 2004.

To see what you've been missing, see the Revision History page, which provides version-by-version details.