Abstract:
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The MEPS-IC is an establishment survey that collects data about employer-sponsored health insurance. Because states are important in the health insurance market, the IC sample was designed to produce good state-level estimates. In addition, there is great demand for sub-state estimates, but the enhanced state-level samples cannot produce good estimates of sub-state groups, such as an industry within a state. To get good small area estimates, we extend the work of Walkup and Sommers (2001), who developed model-assisted estimates by predicting values for all of the establishments on the frame. We develop model-assisted estimates and composite estimates and evaluate them in terms of their bias and mean squared error. The variances of the estimates are estimated by the method of balanced half-samples. Both the model-assisted estimates and the composite estimates have smaller mean squared errors than the standard estimates. Adding weights to one of the models reduces the bias of one of the estimates.
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