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Posts tagged ‘employment’

Dec 20

Bob Baur's Photo

Don’t Worry if Unemployment Seems to Get Stuck in 2013

Last week, we put out a 2013 economic outlook. Our take on the U.S. economy is fairly positive…if the U.S. government can avoid the nastiest parts of the fiscal cliff. So let’s say that Republicans and Democrats can come to a solution, and the United States manages to avoid recession in the first half of the year. As the U.S. economy keeps improving in 2013, the unemployment rate should keep dropping, right? It’s dropped from 8.8% last November to its current level of 7.8% in about 12 months.

Well, as we get into 2013, don’t be too worried if that pace seems to stall for a while…at least, don’t worry that the recovery has stalled. Read more

Oct 24

robin anderson

Economic-Data Nerd Alert – ADP to Change Survey Methods on Their Jobs Report

So, today Automatic Data Processing Inc. (everybody calls them ADP) announced that they’ll be changing (their press release used the word “enhance”) the methodology they use on their widely followed monthly survey of private-sector hiring. For those of you who don’t know, ADP is a big payroll-processing company that also counts payroll numbers. ADP payrolls are important statistics to compliment the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ nonfarm payroll (NFP) data and have the potential to move the markets. Typically, the ADP report comes out the Wednesday before NFP info.

The problem – if you want to call it that – has been the criticisms that ADP’s data send out confusing signals. Read more

Oct 10

robin anderson

Even More Thoughts on the Household Survey from the Jobs Report

More and more interesting stuff comes out on the jobs report. My post yesterday mentioned some issues surrounding the change in the number of part-time workers in the employment numbers. I just came across this report from Robert Barbera at the Johns Hopkins Center for Financial Economics (thanks to Economist’s View for finding this). While I feel we’ll likely have to wait for several more months of data to determine if the lower unemployment rate is a trend or not, Dr. Barbera posits that the spike in part-timers is itself a trend, which he attributes to “faulty seasonal adjustments.”

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Oct 5

robin anderson

Getting Down to Business on Getting Back to Work

Remember today everyone. Today’s the day that the unemployment rate fell below 8.0% in the United States. At 7.8%, this is the lowest unemployment rate since January of 2009. Don’t get me wrong, the economy has still got a long way to go, but you’ve got to admit that it feels good to see that number tick down. And the best part is…the unemployment percentage dropped not because people were giving up the search and dropping out, but because they were getting hired.

Here’s what it looked like according to the data release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics (you can read their full report here). There was in increase in total nonfarm payroll employment during September of 114,000, while the unemployment rate notched down from 8.1% to 7.8%. This is based on the so-called Household Survey, where the BLS calls around to about 60,000 households every month to find out if people have been working, have been looking for work, or aren’t working.

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