This paper considers benchmarking issues in the context of small area estimation. We find optimal estimators within the class of benchmarked linear estimators under linear constraints. This extends existing results for external and internal benchmarking, and also links the two. Necessary and...

A robust hierarchical Bayes method is developed to smooth small area means when a number of covariates are available. The method is particularly suited when one or more outliers are present in the data. It is well known that the regular Bayes estimators of small. area means, under normal prior...