There has been recent growth in small area estimation due to the need for more precise estimation of small geographic areas, which has led to groups such as the U.S. Census Bureau, Google, and the RAND corporation utilizing small area-estimation procedures. We develop a novel two-stage...

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...

While developing a prior distribution for any Bayesian analysis, it is important to check whether the corresponding posterior distribution becomes degenerate in the limit to the true parameter value as the sample size increases. In the same vein, it is also important to understand a more...