Typically survey data have responses with gaps, outliers and ties, and the distributions of the responses might be skewed. Usually, in small area estimation, predictive inference is done using a two-stage Bayesian model with normality at both levels (responses and area means).This is the...

Objective: The objective of the article is to present in a didactic and concise way the fundamental concepts of item response theory (IRT) and its possible application in the economic sciences and show the bias problem that occurred when estimating a latent variable such as financial capital in...