Spatial Microeconometrics

Spatial Microeconometrics introduces the reader to the basic concepts of spatial statistics, spatial econometrics and the spatial behavior of economic agents at the microeconomic level. Incorporating useful examples and presenting real data and datasets on real firms, the book takes the reader through the key topics in a systematic way. The book outlines the specificities of data that represent a set of interacting individuals with respect to traditional econometrics that treat their locational choices as exogenous and their economic behavior as independent. In particular, the authors address the consequences of neglecting such important sources of information on statistical inference and how to improve the model predictive performances. The book presents the theory, clarifies the concepts and instructs the readers on how to perform their own analyses, describing in detail the codes which are necessary when using the statistical language R. The book is written by leading figures in the field and is completely up to date with the very latest research. It will be invaluable for graduate students and researchers in economic geography, regional science, spatial econometrics, spatial statistics and urban economics.

Spatial Econometrics is a rapidly evolving field born from the joint efforts of economists, statisticians, econometricians and regional scientists. The book provides the reader with a broad view of the topic by including both methodological and application papers. Indeed the application papers relate to a number of diverse scientific fields ranging from hedonic models of house pricing to demography, from health care to regional economics, from the analysis of R&D spillovers to the study of retail market spatial characteristics. Particular emphasis is given to regional economic applications of spatial econometrics methods with a number of contributions specifically focused on the spatial concentration of economic activities and agglomeration, regional paths of economic growth, regional convergence of income and productivity and the evolution of regional employment. Most of the papers appearing in this book were solicited from the International Workshop on Spatial Econometrics and Statistics held in Rome (Italy) in 2006.

Written in a comprehensive yet accessible style, this Handbook introduces readers to a range of modern empirical methods with applications in microeconomics, illustrating how to use two of the most popular software packages, Stata and R, in microeconometric applications.

Specially selected from The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics 2nd edition, each article within this compendium covers the fundamental themes within the discipline and is written by a leading practitioner in the field. A handy reference tool.

Spatial econometrics deals with spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity, critical aspects of the data used by regional scientists. These characteristics may cause standard econometric techniques to become inappropriate. In this book, I combine several recent research results to construct a comprehensive approach to the incorporation of spatial effects in econometrics. My primary focus is to demonstrate how these spatial effects can be considered as special cases of general frameworks in standard econometrics, and to outline how they necessitate a separate set of methods and techniques, encompassed within the field of spatial econometrics. My viewpoint differs from that taken in the discussion of spatial autocorrelation in spatial statistics - e.g., most recently by Cliff and Ord (1981) and Upton and Fingleton (1985) - in that I am mostly concerned with the relevance of spatial effects on model specification, estimation and other inference, in what I caIl a model-driven approach, as opposed to a data-driven approach in spatial statistics. I attempt to combine a rigorous econometric perspective with a comprehensive treatment of methodological issues in spatial analysis.

Despite spatial statistics and spatial econometrics both being recent sprouts of the general tree "spatial analysis with measurement"—some may remember the debate after WWII about "theory without measurement" versus "measurement without theory"—several general themes have emerged in the pertaining literature. But exploring selected other fields of possible interest is tantalizing, and this is what the authors intend to report here, hoping that they will suscitate interest in the methodologies exposed and possible further applications of these methodologies. The authors hope that reactions about their publication will ensue, and they would be grateful to reader(s) motivated by some of the research efforts exposed hereafter letting them know about these experiences.

Although interest in spatial regression models has surged in recent years, a comprehensive, up-to-date text on these approaches does not exist. Filling this void, Introduction to Spatial Econometrics presents a variety of regression methods used to analyze spatial data samples that violate the traditional assumption of independence between observat

This book aims at meeting the growing demand in the field by introducing the basic spatial econometrics methodologies to a wide variety of researchers. It provides a practical guide that illustrates the potential of spatial econometric modelling, discusses problems and solutions and interprets empirical results.