Consider the case in which we have data from repeated surveys covering several geographic areas, and our goal is to characterize these areas on a latent trait that underlies multiple indicators. This characterization occurs, for example, in surveys of information and communication technologies...

Using data from the Spanish household budget survey, we investigate life- cycle effects on several product expenditures. A latent-variable model approach is adopted to evaluate the impact of income on expenditures, controlling for the number of members in the family. Two latent factors...

Adversarial relationships have long dominated business relationships, but Supply Chain Management (SCM) entails a new perspective. SCM requires a movement away from arms-length relationships toward partnership style relations. SCM involves integration, co-ordination and collaboration across...

A national survey designed for estimating a specific population quantity is sometimes used for estimation of this quantity also for a small area, such as a province. Budget constraints do not allow a greater sample size for the small area, and so other means of improving estimation have to be...

In this paper I explore the issue of nonlinearity (both in the data generation process and in the functional form that establishes the relationship between the parameters and the data) regarding the poor performance of the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) in small samples. To this purpose I...

This work is part of a project studying the performance of model based estimators in a small area context. We have chosen a simple statistical application in which we estimate the growth rate of accupation for several regions of Spain. We compare three estimators: the direct one based on...

Highly competitive environments are leading companies to implement Supply Chain Management (SCM) to improve performance and gain a competitive advantage. SCM involves integration, co-ordination and collaboration across organisations and throughout the supply chain. It means that SCM requires...

This paper investigates the comparative performance of five small area estimators. We use Monte Carlo simulation in the context of both theoretical and empirical populations. In addition to the direct and indirect estimators, we consider the optimal composite estimator with population weights,...

In this article we propose using small area estimators to improve the estimates of both the small and large area parameters. When the objective is to estimate parameters at both levels accurately, optimality is achieved by a mixed sample design of fixed and proportional allocations. In the mixed...