usecspro: Importing CSPro hierarchical datasets to Stata

Hierarchical datasets are commonly a product of the popular CSPro system developed by the U.S. Census Bureau. CSPro became widely popular and a de facto standard for data collection in many countries; some agencies supply data exclusively in CSPro format. While CSPro can export the data into Stata format on its own, the procedure compromises on some features and requires the user to run CSPro, which operates in MS Windows only. The new Stata module usecspro allows easy import of the hierarchical datasets into Stata by automatically parsing the CSPro dictionary files. The conversion is implemented in Mata and allows importing data from any level and any record of the hierarchical CSPro dataset. It also preserves the variable and value labels and takes care of the missing values and other common concerns during data conversion.