The integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) for Bayesian inference is an efficient approach to estimate the posterior marginal distributions of the parameters and latent effects of Bayesian hierarchical models that can be expressed as latent Gaussian Markov random fields (GMRF). The...

The paper makes an attempt to apply local indicators for categorical data (LICD) in the spatial analysis of economic development. The first part discusses the tests which examine spatial autocorrelation for categorical data. The second part presents a two-stage empirical study covering 66 Polish...

The objective of this paper is to identify classes of regions presenting different economic situations and apply a join-count test to examine spatial dependences between these classes. The test examines spatial autocorrelation on the basis of qualitative data. The global join-count test...

Despite attempts to get around the Jacobian in fitting spatial econometric models by using GMM and other approximations, it remains a central problem for maximum likelihood estimation. In principle, and for smaller data sets, the use of the eigenvalues of the spatial weights matrix provides a...