We’re well into a severe housing downturn by every measure except for the number of people working in residential construction.
Category Archives: employment
New job creation slows significantly
No, I don’t like the latest employment numbers.
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop
Professor Gordon Dahl (my colleague here at UCSD) and Berkeley Professor Stefano DellaVigna have an interesting new research paper titled Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?
The Last Throes of PoMo Macro?
Employment in March: Comparisons across Measures, Time, and Levels vs. Growth
The March employment figures have almost universally been hailed as evidence of a strong labor market, given how the announced value exceeded expectations, and the fact that previous months values were revised upward (WSJ1, WSJ2, Reuters, Bloomberg; contrarian opinion at Big Picture, Capital Spectator). (Jim Hamilton has already discussed how likely these figures are to be revised, in light of other complementary data.) Without disagreeing, I think it behooves us to consider other ways of looking at the data.
Strong March employment growth
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that U.S. nonfarm payrolls, as measured by their survey of establishments, increased by a seasonally adjusted 180,000 workers in March.
Attaining Internal and External Equilibrium in China
China raises rates again. What will higher rates do?
Slower employment growth
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that U.S. nonfarm payrolls, as measured by their survey of establishments, increased by a seasonally adjusted 97,000 workers in February.
Discussing the Economy on Minnesota Public Radio
I talked about trade and the economy with AEI’s James Glassman on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning show a week ago. The link to the audio file is here
Combining forecasts
I have been suggesting that the best statistical approach, when confronted with conflicting signals such as the employment estimates from the BLS payroll survey, the separate BLS household survey, or the huge database from the private company Automatic Data Processing, is not to selectively throw some of the data out but rather to combine the different measures. Judging from some of the comments this suggestion has received both