Conditional and unconditional analysis of some small area estimators in complex sampling - ARCHIVED

This work deals with the unconditional and conditional properties of some well-known small area estimators: expansion, post-stratified ratio, synthetic, composite, sample size dependent and the empirical best linear unbiased predictor (EBLUP). A two-stage sampling design is considered as it is commonly used in household surveys conducted by the National Statistics Institute of Italy. An evaluation is carried out through a simulation based on 1991 Italian census data. The small areas considered are the local labour market areas, which are unplanned domains that cut across the boundaries of the design strata.