A spatial heterogeneity mixed model with skew-elliptical distributions

The distribution of observations in most econometric studies with spatial heterogeneity is skewed. Usually, a single transformation of the data is used to approximate normality and to model the transformed data with a normal assumption. This assumption is however not always appropriate due to the fact that panel data often exhibit non-normal characteristics. In this work, the normality assumption is relaxed in spatial mixed models, allowing for spatial heterogeneity. An inference procedure based on Bayesian mixed modeling is carried out with a multivariate skew-elliptical distribution, which includes the skew-t, skew-normal, student-t, and normal distributions as special cases. The methodology is illustrated through a simulation study and according to the empirical literature, we fit our models to non-life insurance consumption observed between 1998 and 2002 across a spatial panel of 103 Italian provinces in order to determine its determinants. Analyzing the posterior distribution of some parameters and comparing various model comparison criteria indicate the proposed model to be superior to conventional ones.