The ascii format is mainly used in Gauss. It could be troublesome to change the format of your data to ascii without proper tools. However, it is not difficult to complete such task by Python. I wrote a little program to make this process easier.
We use the data from Head and Mayer (2014) as an example. It can be download from their companion website. The file is Stata .dta format. I will use pandas package to read the data as pandas dataframe, and then use astropy package to turn it to astropy table format. The last step is to export the astropy table as ascii file. One can modify the following python code to complete such task.
# Load packages
import pandas as pd
import astropy
import astropy.table as Table
# Set file path
file_path = "/file_directory/"
data_file = "monte1and3_for_website.dta"
# Read data as pandas dataframe
df = pd.read_stata(file_path + data_file)
# Turn it to astropy table
tb = astropy.table.Table.from_pandas(df)
# Export the table as ascii format file
astropy.io.ascii.write(tb, file_path + "monte1and3_for_website.dat")