The purpose of models is not to fit the data but to sharpen the questions. S. Karlin, 11th R. A. Fisher Memorial Lecture, Royal Society, 20 April 1983 We are proud to offer this volume in honour of the remarkable career of the Father of Spatial Econometrics, Professor Jean Paelinck, presently of the Tinbergen Institute, Rotterdam. Not one to model solely for the sake of modelling, the above quotation nicely captures Professor Paelinck's unceasing quest for the best question for which an answer is needed. His FLEUR model has sharpened many spatial economics and spatial econometrics questions! Jean Paelinck, arguably, is the founder of modem spatial econometrics, penning the seminal introductory monograph on this topic, Spatial Econometrics, with Klaassen in 1979. In the General Address to the Dutch Statistical Association, on May 2, 1974, in Tilburg, "he coined the term [spatial econometrics] to designate a growing body of the regional science literature that dealt primarily with estimation and testing problems encountered in the implementation of multiregional econometric models" (Anselin, 1988, p. 7); he already had introduced this idea in his introductory report to the 1966 Annual Meeting of the Association de Science Regionale de Langue Fran~aise.

1 Introduction: Focus on Jean Paelinck.- One: Spatial Economic Theory and Econometrics.- 2 Recent Results in Tinbergen-Bos Analysis.- 3 An Economic Definition of the City.- 4 On the Heckscher-Ohlin Analysis and the Gains from Trade with Profit-Maximizing and Labour-Managed Firms.- 5 The Box-Cox Transformation: New Computation and Interpretation Features of the Parameters.- 6 Improving the Stein-Rule Estimator of Each Individual Regression Coefficient Using the Stein Variance Estimator.- Two: Spatial Analysis and Methods.- 7 A Spatial Version of the Chi-Square Goodness-of-fit Test and Its Applications to Test for Spatial Clustering.- 8 Some Effects of Spatial Aggregation on Multivariate Regression Parameters.- 9 Reexamination of Limited Maximum Likelihood Estimation.- 10 Developments in Flow-Based Location-Allocation Models.- 11 Heuristic Concentration: Its Care and Feeding.- Three: Applications.- 12 The Use of a Local Statistic to Study the Diffusion of AIDS from San Francisco.- 13 Regional Disparity in the European Union: 1950-1990.- 14 Toward a Spatialized Cost of Capital Concept.- Epilogue.