The goal of this paper is to review and discuss OxGauss, a program available with recent versions of Ox. 1 OxGauss provides a way to run Gauss 2 programs in the Ox environment or to call an existing Gauss procedure under Ox in the same way that C or Fortran programs can be called from Gauss and Ox. Unlike the old g2ox program provided with Ox, OxGauss is not a Gauss-to-Ox translator.
Depending on the goal of the analysis and the user's experience, both features are noteworthy and useful. From an Ox user point of view, the main objective of OxGauss is to allow existing Gauss programs to be called from Ox with only a minimum number of changes to these programs. This is beneficial to both Ox and Gauss users. It provides more visibility to both and hence increases the potential use of the underlying statistical technique. Furthermore, it can help with the migration from Gauss to Ox.
Running a pure Gauss code with OxGauss is attractive for non-Gauss and potentially even for non-Ox users because it allows the replication of published work using the console version of Ox. This is an interesting feature since the replicability of simulation and empirical results in econometrics is recognized as being an important aspect of research. An increasing number of researchers in econometrics are making their programs and routines freely available to the econometrics community. As such, OxGauss also provides much added value in that it provides the researcher with a free and rather simple solution to run Gauss programs.