Stochastic Processes for Spatial Econometrics

This monograph presents a general methodology which is shown to be valid in the analysis of spatial point structures and that is certainly easier to use by non-expert researchers coming from other applied sciences than other much modern techniques. We suggest that the local conditioning approach has the advantage that it is statistically efficient, easy to correct for edge-effects and provides similar results than other (more complicated) likelihood-based methods. We show a mathematical justification to prove that any purely inhibitory pairwise interaction point process (pipp) can be obtained as the limit of a sequence of auto-Poisson lattice schemes and within this context we develop the pseudolikelihood estimating equations. We particularly focus on developing a Monte Carlo simulation study to analyze the behaviour of the parameter s of a particular pipp model derived using this technique. We also stress that this methodology has a wide range of applications in many fields, particularly in economy and demography.