The biasedness issue arising from the maximum likelihood estimation of the spatial autoregressive model (SAR) is further investigated under a broader set-up than that in Bao and Ullah (2007a). A major difficulty in analytically evaluating the expectations of ratios of quadratic forms is overcome...

Motivated by a recent study of Bao and Ullah (2007a) on finite sample properties of MLE in the pure SAR (spatial autoregressive) model, a general method for third-order bias and variance corrections on a nonlinear estimator is proposed based on stochastic expansion and bootstrap. Working with...