Likelihood functions of spatial autoregressive models with normal but heteroskedastic disturbances have been already derived [Anselin (1988, ch.6)]. But there is no implementation for maximum likelihood estimation of these likelihood functions in general (heteroskedastic disturbances) cases....

We investigate the finite-sample bias of the quasi-maximum likelihood estimator (QMLE) in spatial autoregressive models with possible exogenous regressors. We derive the approximate bias result of the QMLE in terms of model parameters and also the moments (up to order 4) of the error...