Inference for Spatial Autoregressive Models with Infinite Variance Noises

A self-weighted quantile procedure is proposed to study the inference for a spatial unilateral autoregressive model with independent and identically distributed innovations belonging to the domain of attraction of a stable law with index of stability alpha, alpha is an element of (0, 2]. It is shown that when the model is stationary, the self-weighted quantile estimate of the parameter has a closed form and converges to a normal limiting distribution, which avoids the difficulty of Roknossadati and Zarepour (2010) in deriving their limiting distribution for an M-estimate. On the contrary, we show that when the model is not stationary, the proposed estimates have the same limiting distributions as those of Roknossadati and Zarepour. Furthermore, a Wald test statistic is proposed to consider the test for a linear restriction on the parameter, and it is shown that under a local alternative, the Wald statistic has a non-central chisquared distribution. Simulations and a real data example are also reported to assess the performance of the proposed method.