The surge of government debt during the post-global financial crisis and the ongoing euro zone sovereign debt crisis has begun raising concerns whether government debt levels have hit the tipping points. This study offers to contribute in the following ways: First, we find out whether the...

The dynamics of government debt and economic growth, once a subject of interest mostly to very few macroeconomists is suddenly of immense attention for many researchers in the backdrop of Euro zone sovereign debt crisis and Reinhart & Rogoff’s related research. This study investigates the...

We provide a comprehensive overview of latent Markov (LM) models for the analysis of longitudinal data. The main assumption behind these models is that the response variables are conditionally independent given a latent process which follows a first-order Markov chain. We first illustrate the...

In the context of multilevel longitudinal data, where sample units are collected in clusters, an important aspect that should be accounted for is the unobserved heterogeneity between sample units and between clusters. For this aim we propose an approach based on nested hidden (latent) Markov...

We propose a finite mixture latent trajectory model to study the behavior of firms in terms of open-ended employment contracts that are activated and terminated during a certain period. The model is based on the assumption that the population of firms is composed by unobservable clusters (or...

We consider estimation of the causal effect of a sequential binary treatment (typically corresponding to a policy or a subsidy in the economic context) on a final outcome, when the treatment assignment at a given occasion depends on the sequence of previous assignments as well as on time-varying...