To use, or not to use the Spatial Durbin model? (Koley & Bera 2024)

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🎙️ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit — the podcast where great research meets great curiosity. I’m your host, and today, we’re diving into a question that echoes through the halls of spatial econometrics like a Shakespearean soliloquy:

🧠 “To use, or not to use the Spatial Durbin Model? — that is the question.”

👩‍🔬👨‍🔬 Penned by the brilliant Malabika Koley and Anil K. Bera, this award-winning article — yes, 🏆 Best Paper awarded by Spatial Economic Analysis in May 2025 — was published on November 9, 2023 in none other than the prestigious 🔝 Spatial Economic Analysis, an ABDC B Journal under the mighty umbrella of Routledge Taylor & Francis.

📊 Now, the Spatial Durbin Model, or SDM for short, has been a crowd favorite in spatial econometrics. But here’s the twist: most researchers skip a crucial theoretical test before using it — a test that separates SDM from its cousin, the Spatial Error Model. Why? Because testing non-linear restrictions is... well, a headache. 😩

But fear not — our authors have a fix. They propose a smarter, cleaner, linear way to test this restriction, using Rao’s score tests and a powerful enhancement from Bera and Yoon. 🚀 Their approach is robust, relies only on ordinary least squares (OLS), and has been put through the wringer with an extensive Monte Carlo simulation and two real-world datasets. Spoiler alert: it works really well. 🎯

So now we ask...
🤔 If we can test it more easily... should we still keep ignoring it?

📚 Huge thanks to Malabika Koley, Anil K. Bera, and the publisher Routledge Taylor & Francis for making this groundbreaking work open-access — because science should be for everyone! 🌍💡

✨ Don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast, Revise and Resubmit, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Prime — and if you’re a weekend warrior of wisdom, check out our YouTube channel: Weekend Researcher! 🎧📺

💥 Knowledge is power. But only if you ask the right questions.

Reference

Malabika Koley & Anil K. Bera (2024) To use, or not to use the spatial Durbin model? – that is the question, Spatial Economic Analysis, 19:1, 30-56. https://doi.org/10.1080/17421772.2023.2256810

Regional Studies Association. (2025, May 20). 2025 Spatial Economic Analysis Best Paper. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1otaiKdV0Y

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