Three Essays On Continuous And Discrete Spatial Heterogeneity

Continuous and discrete unobserved heterogeneity have been widely used in modeling discrete choice models. In this dissertation I investigate how these modeling strategies can be used to capture and model spatial heterogeneity or locally varying coefficients for different latent structures. In the first chapter, I outline the main advantages and disadvantages of both continuous and discrete spatial modeling strategies. Then I conduct a simulation experiment in order to understand the ability of both approaches to retrieve the true representation of the spatially varying process under small sample size situations. The results show that the data requirement to achieve lower bias in the continuous case is substantial compared with the discrete case. I have also found that, as the number of individuals per spatial unit increases, both models are able to identify the regional-specific estimates. However, the discrete case is able to retrieve the true spatial heterogeneity surface with lower bias and better coverage. In the second chapter, I show the Rchoice package for R that allows estimating models with individual heterogeneity for both cross-sectional and panel data. In particular, the package allows binary, ordinal and count response, as well as continuous and discrete covariates. This chapter is a general description of Rchoice and all functionalities are illustrated using real databases. The last chapter shows how continuous and discrete spatial heterogeneity models can be applied in order to analyze whether monetary subjective well-being eval- uations vary across space using a cross-sectional dataset from Chile. The results show that focusing just on the average estimates of compensating variations veils useful local variation. Moreover, the discrete approach shows some weak superiority over the continuous case in terms of model fit and interpretation.

Geographical Weighted Regression (GWR) is a new local modelling technique for analysing spatial analysis. This technique allows local as opposed to global models of relationships to be measured and mapped. This is the first and only book on this technique, offering comprehensive coverage on this new 'hot' topic in spatial analysis. * Provides step-by-step examples of how to use the GWR model using data sets and examples on issues such as house price determinants, educational attainment levels and school performance statistics * Contains a broad discussion of and basic concepts on GWR through to ideas on statistical inference for GWR models * uniquely features accompanying author-written software that allows users to undertake sophisticated and complex forms of GWR within a user-friendly, Windows-based, front-end (see book for details).

This edited volume compiles a set of papers that present various applications of spatial analysis, both traditional and contemporary, on diverse subjects in a wide range of contexts. The volume is dedicated to the memory of the late Professor Pavlos Kanaroglou, McMaster University, Canada, who greatly contributed to scientific and applied research on spatial analysis. In his honor, the book offers a selection of various spatial analysis approaches to the study of contemporary urban transportation, land use, and air pollution issues. The first part of the book discusses selected general issues in spatial analysis; ontologies, agent-based modelling and accessibility analysis. The second part deals with urban transportation analysis and modelling issues; agent-based activity/travel microsimulation, bottleneck models, public transit use, freight transport and connected automated vehicles impact assessment. Part three focuses on integrated land use and transport analysis, discussing the land value impacts of public transport infrastructure, the role of transport provision on business evolution and commute distance considerations in urban relocation. The fourth part, on travel-related air pollution analysis, presents the development of a geo-information software for mapping Aerosol Optical Thickness in urban environments and the development of a neighborhood level, real time, internet-enabled, air pollution map in the Canadian urban context. This book will appeal to academics, researchers, graduate students, consultants, and practitioners working on topics related to spatial analysis, land use and transport analysis, planning and decision making, and air pollution studies.

Corals and coral reefs are seriously degraded in most tropical seas. Most of the damage is due to over-exploitation and the use of destructive fishing methods. This collection of essays presents a number of case studies on the economic analysis of coral reefs.

Including contributions spanning a variety of theoretical and applied topics in econometrics, this volume of Advances in Econometrics is published in honour of Cheng Hsiao.

This work examines theoretical issues, as well as practical developments in statistical inference related to econometric models and analysis. This work offers discussions on such areas as the function of statistics in aggregation, income inequality, poverty, health, spatial econometrics, panel and survey data, bootstrapping and time series.

This 1985 book comprises essays reviewing areas of the applications of gravity theory to which Professor Bonnor had contributed. The influence of his work in two important fields of interest to astonomers, physicists and mathematicians, galaxy formation and the study of axisymmetric solutions in general relativity, is well recognised.