In honor of James P. LeSage

One can have an impact on a field in a variety of ways such as papers published in prestigious journals, through service to associations, and through students. Certainly, James LeSage has published extensively in a variety of fields including economics and econometrics, regional science, spatial econometrics and statistics. He has helped organize sessions and performed other conference-related work, and he has involved students in the field of spatial econometrics. But his sincere desire to aid research and researchers in this field merits special mention. This takes a variety of forms, the most important being his presence on the Internet in the form of his econometrics toolbox that includes a substantial spatial component. He helps a large number of individuals interested in spatial research through his e-mail support of the toolbox and by answering general questions pertaining to spatial econometrics. This web site collection of public domain econometric and spatial econometric algorithms receives over 100,000 visits from individuals in over 100 countries during a typical 3-month period. James LeSage has shown a range of intellectual interests since he began publishing in 1980. His early work over the period to about 1995 focused on econometric modeling of interregional labor markets, based on Bayesian variants of vector autoregressive and error correction models. These variants developed Bayesian priors that were being used at the time to model macroeconomic time series. Special features of interregional time series were incorporated into stochastic prior restrictions on the parameters. For example, co-integrating relationships between local and export employment that lead to statistical equilibrium relationships were exploited to improve forecasting performance for regional labor markets in articles that appeared in Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Regional