In the context of the Fay–Herriot model, a mixed regression model routinely used to combine information from various sources in small area estimation, certain adjustments to a standard likelihood (e.g., profile, residual, etc.) have been recently proposed in order to produce strictly positive...

The empirical Bayes (EB) estimator or empirical best linear unbiased predictor (EBLUP) in the linear mixed model (LMM) is useful for the small area estimation in the sense of increasing the precision of estimation of small area means. However, one potential difficulty of EB is that when...