Fixed effects differencing

[chartwel]

Hi all,

is there an easy way to do a fixed-effects specification in e-views using differencing, either first differences or "de-meaning"? I have time-series data for one country across a series of variables and want to compare the influence of one variable (labor legislation) on unemployment, controlling for other macroeconomic variables - but given that OLS is probably going to suffer from omitted variable bias, I want to do a fixed-effects specification. Since the data is one cross-section over time, dated with regular frequency, I can't do either panel data or pooled objects in eviews, so I'll have to tackle it via first-differencing....

so my question is, is there any way to do this easily in eviews? That is, is there a macro or command or (best of all) an option to tick when doing my OLS regression that will allow for differencing for FE, or will I have to generate each series and then run the regression that way?

FInal question - if I do it that way, will the constant (intercept) reported be unbiased and/or accurate?

[EViews Gareth]

I don't understand the question. Given you only have one cross-section, what are you trying to first-difference?

If you really just want to first-difference all of your variables, then you can put a D( ) around them, (i.e. instead of regressing Y C X1 X2, you can do D(Y) C D(X1) D(X2) ). However I don't see how that will fix your particular problem.