The paper develops empirical Bayes and benchmarked empirical Bayes estimators of positive small area means under multiplicative models. A simple example will be estimation of per capita income for small areas. It is now well-understood that small area estimation needs explicit,...

The paper concerns small-area estimation in the heteroscedastic nested error regression (HNER) model which assumes that the within-area variances are different among areas. Although HNER is useful for analyzing data where the within-area variation changes from area to area, it is difficult to...