Optimal stock/flow panels

A stock/flow panel is a way of sampling a population of agents moving through a collection of discrete states. The scheme is to form separate samples of the residents of each state — the stocks — and of those moving between states — the flows. We calculate optimal stock/flow sampling schemes and provide efficient estimators of the transition intensities in the particular case of an alternating Poisson process. We also compute the efficiency gains compared to randomly sampled panels.