Direct Standard Errors for Regressions with Spatially Autocorrelated Residuals

Morgan Kelly

No 14483, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Abstract Regressions using data with known locations are increasingly used in empirical economics, and several standard error corrections are available to deal with the fact that their residuals tend to be spatially correlated. Unfortunately, different corrections commonly return significance levels that vary by several orders of magnitude, leaving the researcher uncertain as to which, if any, is valid. This paper proposes instead an extremely fast and simple procedure to derive standard errors directly from the spatial correlation structure of regression residuals. Importantly, because the estimated covariance matrix gives optimal weights to predict each residual as a linear combination of all residuals, the reliability of these standard errors is self-checking by construction. The approach extends immediately to instrumental variables, balanced and unbalanced panels, and a wide class of nonlinear models. A step by step guide to estimating these standard errors is given in the accompanying tutorials.

Date: 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14483 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:14483

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14483

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().