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There are programs like Dynare which are used mostly by economists and answering questions about which may require knowledge of economics.

Then there are programs like Stata and Matlab which are used by economists but not exclusively.

Would questions about either kind of program be on-topic for this site?

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  • $\begingroup$ @EnergyNumbers Citation not found, question edited. Thanks. $\endgroup$
    – Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya
    Nov 24, 2014 at 3:13

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I think a useful thought exercise is to ask yourself: in my ultimate dream world, would I be better-off getting help from an economist, a statistician, a mathematician, or a computer programmer? It seems to me like an honest answer to that question will direct you to the appropriate Stack Exchange site for your question.

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I believe it really depends on the nature of the question. Take stata questions. If the question is purely a programming issue it should probably be moved to stackoverflow. There are 1000 questions with the stata tag there already anyway. And maybe still it belongs to cross-validated.

This, by the way, will always be tricky. There are 70k R questions in stackoverflow, even though there is a specific QA site for statistics. Even weirder there are 3000 latex questions on stackoverflow even when a very specific TeX site exists.

In general though, if you can, just help.

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    $\begingroup$ The TeX site was created after stackoverflow. Prior its creation LaTeX questions went on stackexchange and stackoverflow. These questions generated interest in creating a tex.se $\endgroup$
    – user218
    Nov 24, 2014 at 12:28
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I think software questions can be on-topic, because they can often be linked to particular problems about which you'd like to know more than a pure software answer. In addition to the purely technical answer, you may want to know about related literature, or "well known but unpublished" facts for your particular problem, or even code examples which may exist for particular published models. These answers are likely best known by people who specialize in computational economics.

At the end of the day, I think @Ubiquitous provides a good heuristic.

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