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The Department of Health and Human Services uses estimates of the median income of four-person families for all the fifty states and the District of Columbia to formulate its energy assistance program for low income families. Such estimates are provided by the US Census Bureau on an annual basis. A hierarchical time series model is considered to combine information from three relevant sources: (a) Current Population Survey (CPS), (b) Decennial Censuses and (c) Bureau of Economic Analysis. An empirical Bayes (EB) method is used to smooth the CPS estimates of the median income of four-person families for the states. The proposed method is an advancement over the EB method currently used by the US Bureau of the Census in the sense that it uses a more realistic model, provides maximum likelihood and residual maximum likelihood method of variance components estimation and provides a valid …