Two measures of employment: how different are they?

Tao Wu ()

FRBSF Economic Letter, 2004, issue aug27

Abstract: Since the end of the 2001 recession, the U.S. economy has performed pretty well in terms of output growth, averaging about 3-1/4 percent a year. But how well has the economy performed in terms of creating jobs? To answer that question, most analysts look at two independent monthly estimates of employment published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). And the problem is that each sends a different signal about recent labor market conditions. The so-called payroll survey has been reporting a substantial loss in employment and a slow recovery of labor market conditions, while the so-called household survey indicates much less of a loss and a much faster recovery. ; How do these two employment measures differ? Which is a more accurate measure of aggregate employment? This Economic Letter examines the historical and recent behavior of these two employment measures to answer these questions.

Keywords: Employment; (Economic; theory) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2004/el2004-23.html (text/html)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2004/el2004-23.html [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2004/el2004-23.html)
http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2004/el2004-23.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedfel:y:2004:i:aug27:n:2004-23

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in FRBSF Economic Letter from Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Research Library ().