Robust small area estimation combining time series and cross-sectional data - ARCHIVED

The common approach to small area estimation is to exploit the cross-sectional relationships of the data in an attempt to borrow information from one small area to assist in the estimation in others. However, in the case of repeated surveys, further gains in efficiency can be secured by modelling the time series properties of the data as well. We illustrate the idea by considering regression models with time varying, cross-sectionally correlated coefficients. The use of past relationships to estimate current means raises the question of how to protect against model breakdowns. We propose a modification which guarantees that the model dependent predictors of aggregates of the small area means coincide with the corresponding survey estimators and we explore the statistical properties of the modification. The proposed procedure is applied to data on home sale prices used for the computation of housing price indexes.