Publication: Estimation of proportions in small areas: application to the labour force using the Swiss Census Structural Survey
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2020-01-01
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Wiley
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Abstract
The main objectives of this paper are to find efficient but computationally simple
estimators for the proportions of people in the labour force (economic activity rates) in Swiss
communes and to estimate their mean-squared error (MSE) over the sampling replication mechanism
(the design MSE). This will be done by combining survey data with administrative data
provided by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office. We find estimators with considerably greater
efficiency than currently used direct estimators and that are easy to implement. We show that,
under a generalized linear mixed model with logit link, the computationally expensive empirical
best predictor does not perform appreciably better than a plug-in estimator. Moreover, for moderate
proportions of active workers, the empirical best linear unbiased predictor (EBLUP) based
on a much simpler linear mixed model performs similarly to the above estimators. We propose
new bootstrap estimators of the design MSE of the EBLUPs, which ‘borrow strength’ similarly to
EBLUPs. Realistic simulation studies carried out under both model- and design-based set-ups
indicate great gains in efficiency of the selected small area estimators over the traditional direct
estimators and acceptable performance of the proposed bootstrap MSE estimators. In the application
using the Swiss data, coefficient-of-variation reductions of the estimates obtained for
the communes are remarkable.
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Keywords
Design mean-squared error, Generalized linear mixed model logit link, Small area estimation
Bibliographic citation
Molina, I., & Strzalkowska‐Kominiak, E. (2019). Estimation of proportions in small areas: application to the labour force using the Swiss Census Structural Survey. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society), 183 (1), pp. 281-310.