Estimating unemployment in very small areas

• Autores: María Dolores Ugarte Martínez , Tomás Goicoa Mangado , Ana Fernández Militino , Marina Sagaseta López
• Localización: Sort: Statistics and Operations Research Transactions, ISSN 1696-2281, Vol. 33, Nº. 1, 2009, págs. 49-70
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo (pdf)
• Resumen

  • In the last few years, European countries have shown a deep interest in applying small area techniques to produce reliable estimates at county level. However, the specificity of every European country and the heterogeneity of the available auxiliary information, make the use of a common methodology a very difficult task. In this study, the performance of several design-based, model-assisted, and model-based estimators using different auxiliary information for estimating unemployment at small area level is analyzed. The results are illustrated with data from Navarre, an autonomous region located at the north of Spain and divided into seven small areas. After discussing pros and cons of the different alternatives, a composite estimator is chosen, because of its good trade-off between bias and variance. Several methods for estimating the prediction error of the proposed estimator are also provided.

• Referencias bibliográficas
  • Costa, A., Satorra, A. and Ventura, E. (2002). Estimadores compuestos en estadı́stica regional: Aplicación para la tasa de variación...
  • Costa, A., Satorra, A. and Ventura, E. (2003). An empirical evaluation of small area estimators. SORT (Statistics and Operations Research...
  • Costa, A., Satorra, A. and Ventura, E. (2004). Using composite estimators to improve both domain and total area estimation. SORT (Statistics...
  • Costa, A., Satorra, A. and Ventura, E. (2006). Improving small area estimation by combining surveys: new perspectives in regional statistics....
  • Drew, D, Singh, M. P. and Choudhry, G. H. (1982). Evaluation of small area estimation techniques for the Canadian labor Force Survey. Survey...
  • Ghosh, M. and Rao, J. N. K. (1994). Small area estimation: an appraisal. Statistical Science, 9, 55-93.
  • Ghosh, N. and Särndal, C. E. (2001). Lecture Notes on Estimation for Population Domains and Small Areas. Statistics Finland, vol. 48.
  • González, M. E. (1973). Use and evaluation of synthetic estimates. Proceedings of the Social Statistics Section 33-36. American Statistical...
  • McCullagh P. and Nelder, J. A. (1989). Generalized Linear Models. Chapman and Hall.
  • Militino A. F.,Ugarte, M. D., Goicoa, T. and González-Audı́cana, M. (2006). Using small area models to estimate the total area occupied...
  • Militino A. F., Ugarte, M. D. and Goicoa, T. (2007a). A BLUP synthetic versus an EBLUP estimator: an empirical study of a small area estimation...
  • Militino A. F., Ugarte, M. D. and Goicoa, T. (2007b). Combining sampling and model weights in agricultural small area estimation. Environmetrics,...
  • Morales, D., Esteban, M. D., Sánchez, A. Santamarı́a, L., Marhuenda, Y., Pérez, A., Saralegui, J. and Herrador, M. (2007). Estimación...
  • Quenouille, M. (1949). Approximate tests of correlation in time series. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, 11, 18-84.
  • Quenouille, M. (1956). Notes on bias in estimation. Biometrika, 43, 353-360.
  • Rao, J. N. K. (2003). Small Area Estimation. Wiley Series in Survey Methodology.
  • Rao, J. N. K. and Wu, C. F. J. (1988). Resampling inference with complex survey data. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 83,...
  • Särndal, C. E., Swensson B. and Wretman, J. H. (1992). Model Assisted Survey Sampling. Springer.
  • Tukey, J. (1958). Bias and confidence in not quite large samples (abstract). Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 29, 614.
  • Ugarte, M. D., Militino, A. F. and Goicoa, T. (2008). Benchmarked estimates in small areas using linear mixed models with restrictions, Test,...
  • Valliant, R., Dorfman, A. H. and Royall, R. M. (2000). Finite Population Sampling and Inference: a Prediction Approach. Wiley Series in Survey...
  • Woodruff, R. S. (1971). A simple method for approximating the variance of a complicated estimate. Journal of the American Statistical Association,...
  • You, Y. and Rao J. N. K. (2002). A pseudo-empirical best linear prediction approach to small-area estimation using survey weights. Canadian...