Modified harmonic mean method for spatial autoregressive models

In this paper, I suggest using the modified harmonic mean method for estimating marginal likelihood functions of cross-sectional spatial autoregressive models. In a Bayesian estimation setting, I show how this method can be used for popular cross-sectional spatial autoregressive models. In a simulation study, I investigate the finite sample performance of this estimator along with some other popular information criteria for the nested and non-nested model selection problems. The simulation results show that the modified harmonic mean estimator performs satisfactorily, and can be useful for the specification search exercises in spatial econometrics.