Do other peoples' incomes reduce the happiness which people in advanced countries experience from any given income? And does this help to explain why in the U.S., Germany and some other advanced countries, happiness has been constant for many decades? The answer to both questions is "Yes". We...

Richer people are happier than poorer people, but when a country becomes richer over time, its people do not become happier. This seemingly contradictory pair of findings of Richard Easterlin has be-come famous as the Easterlin Paradox. However, it was met with counterevidence. To shed more...

This paper shows how the dynamic linear model with fixed regressors can be efficiently estimated. This dynamic model can be used to distinguish spurious correlation from state dependence and we show that the integrated likelihood estimator is adaptive for any asymptotics with T increasing where...

In this study, I investigate the necessary condition for consistency of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of spatial models with a spatial moving average process in the disturbance term. I show that the MLE of spatial autoregressive and spatial moving average parameters is generally...

Motivated by the desire to probe macroeconomic tail events and to capture non-linear economic dynamics, we estimate two types of regime switching models: threshold VAR and Markov switching VAR. For each of the models, we estimate regimes which carry the interpretation of recessionary/normal and...

I use a set of vector autoregressive models to forecast some of the main macroeconomic variables in a wide range of countries. The goal is to provide some insight about different forecast accuracy measures in a probabilistic forecasting framework. The countries are selected based on their...

We introduce trajectory balancing, a general reweighting approach to causal inference with time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) data. We focus on settings in which one or more units is exposed to treatment at a given time, while a set of control units remain untreated throughout a time window of...

This chapter presents a unified set of estimation methods for fitting a rich array of models describing dynamic relationships within a longitudinal data setting. The discussion surveys approaches for characterizing the micro dynamics of continuous dependent variables both over time and across...

This paper introduces the concepts of time-specific weak and strong cross section dependence. A double-indexed process is said to be cross sectionally weakly dependent at a given point in time, t, if its weighted average along the cross section dimension (N) converges to its expectation in...