Because of heterogeneity across regions, economic policy measures are increasingly targeted at the regional level. As a result, the need for economic forecasts at a sub-national level is rapidly increasing. The data available to compute regional forecasts is usually based on a pseudo-panel that...

This research examines the effect of spatial aggregation on the accuracy of regional economic forecasts. Literature in econometrics, business forecasting, regional economic forecasting, spatial econometrics, and spatial time series analysis suggests that the issue is far from settled at either...

Machine learning tools are well known for their success in prediction. But prediction is not causation, and causal discovery is at the core of most questions concerning economic policy. Recently, however, the literature has focused more on issues of causality. This paper gently introduces some...