Please help me to solve the "varlist not allowed" error

[Chinh Dang]

I run my code but it doesn't work.
parmby “xi:ardl lnstock lngold lncoin lnoil lnrate, maxlag(2 2 2 2 2) nocons ec1 regstore(res)”, label norestore

The system recognizes the error "varlist not allowed".
How can I solve this problem?

Any help is appreciated, thank you so much.

[William Lisowski]

Short answer: replace the "smart quotation marks" in

parmby “xi:ardl lnstock lngold lncoin lnoil lnrate, maxlag(2 2 2 2 2) nocons ec1 regstore(res)”, label norestore

with standard programming quotation marks

parmby "xi:ardl lnstock lngold lncoin lnoil lnrate, maxlag(2 2 2 2 2) nocons ec1 regstore(res)", label norestore

Long explanation:

The parmby command is a community-contributed command from the Stata Journal, as you are asked by the Statalist FAQ to acknowledge.

StataCorp uses – in their PDFs and in the Stata Journal – "smart quotes" rather than the standard programming quotation marks that users must type for Stata to recognize them. I suspect you copied and pasted code from the journal article to create your command.

Users who copy too literally will have incorrect syntax. Starting in Stata 17 there is a preference setting to replace pasted curly quotes with ASCII quotes, which solves the problem for those who copy and paste from a PDF.

Luckily the output of the help command does not suffer from this problem.