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...

In Europe differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s have been due chiefly to the generosity of welfare state programs - increasing happiness going with increasing generosity and declining happiness with declining generosity. This is the principal...

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...

It is generally accepted that regional labor markets are characterized by strong interdependencies. However, only few studies include spatial elements to their estimations. Using the model framework proposed by Cliff and Ord (1973, 1981) and the estimation technique proposed by Kelejian and...

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...

We study dynamic panel data models where the long run outcome for a particular cross-section is affected by a weighted average of the outcomes in the other cross-sections. We show that imposing such a structure implies several cointegrating relationships that are nonlinear in the coefficients to...

In this paper, I propose an instrumental variable (IV) estimation procedure to estimate global VAR (GVAR) models and show that it leads to consistent and asymptotically normal estimates of the parameters. I also provide computationally simple conditions that guarantee that the GVAR model is...

We develop a new direct approach to approximating suprema of general empirical processes by a sequence of suprema of Gaussian processes, without taking the route of approximating empirical processes themselves in the sup-norm. We prove an abstract approximation theorem that is applicable to a...