Small area estimation of labour force indicators under unit-level multinomial mixed models

This paper presents a new statistical methodology for the small area estimation of the proportion of employed, unemployed and inactive people, and of unemployment rates. The novel empirical best and plug-in predictors are based on a multinomial mixed model that is fitted to unit-level data. Model parameters are estimated by maximum-likelihood and mean-squared errors by parametric bootstrap. Several simulation experiments are carried out to empirically investigate the properties of these estimators and predictors. Finally, a detailed application to real data from the first Spanish Labour Force Survey of 2021 is included, where the target is to map labour force indicators by province, sex, and age group.