The joint usage of unit- and area-level data for model-based small area estimation is investigated. The combination of levels within a single model encloses a variety of methodological problems. Firstly, it implies a critical decrease in degrees of freedom due to more model parameters that need...

The main objective of this PhD was to further develop Bayesian spatio-temporal models (specifically the Conditional Autoregressive (CAR) class of models), for the analysis of sparse disease outcomes such as birth defects. The motivation for the thesis arose from problems encountered when...

The joint usage of unit- and area-level data for model-based small area estimation is investigated. The combination of levels within a single model encloses a variety of methodological problems. Firstly, it implies a critical decrease in degrees of freedom due to more model parameters that need...

In the last two decades researchers from various disciplines have made attempts to model and estimate developments in the size and structure of the population of firms. Although these attempts give useful insights into possible explanatory factors of firm dynamics, the explanatory value, and...

Many OECD countries are facing decreases in the employment rates of disabled workers. To uncover the driving forces of these trends, this paper estimates Age-Period-Cohort (APC) models on administrative data of Disability Insurance (DI) application cohorts for the Netherlands between 1999 and...

Many employees work in jobs that do not match their level of formal education. Status inconsistency theory (SIT) argues that such mismatches result in stress, dissatisfaction, political alienation, and social withdrawal. Status inconsistency may, therefore, pose a threat to social cohesion....

The exact linear dependency among age, period and birth cohort makes it impossible to recover the true parameters of Age-Period-Cohort (APC) models. We then propose to extract reliable information from APC models via the Shapley decomposition, a model-agnostic procedure from game theory that...