Book chapter written by Qian Cai and 2007 DPDF The Political Economy of Redistribution Fellow Rebecca Tippett, featured in Emerging Techniques in Applied Demography:

Population estimates are widely used in fund allocation, revenue sharing, planning, and budgeting at the federal, state, and local levels; as such, accuracy is crucial, and finding the most appropriate data and method to produce the accurate results is a constant goal for estimates professionals.

This chapter examines the viability of the housing unit method, typically used at the sub-county level, for county level estimates. Would this straightforward and easy-to-implement method generate more accurate estimates than the ratio-correlation method or administrative record method? The findings, while not surprising, provide empirical evidence through a thorough, careful, and clear case study.