Workday, Holiday and Calendar Adjustment with 21st Century Data: Monthly Aggregates from Daily Diesel Fuel Purchases

Edward Leamer

No 16897, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper uses a Ceridian transaction-by-transaction data set on purchases of diesel fuel by over-the-road truckers to form a monthly diesel volume purchase index from 1999 to 2011, purged of weekday, holiday and calendar effects. These high-frequency data support a new and improved set of options to correct for (1) the variability in the weekday composition of months and (2) the drift of holiday effects between months. With only monthly data, Census seasonal adjustment methods are forced to make inferences about the effects of both weekday composition and holiday drift. With daily data, these can be directly observed, and removed from the data, if the patterns repeat. But the drift of holiday effects between December and January resists statistical treatment, leaving the December/January comparison the most noisy in a seasonally adjusted monthly series. This problem, and other issues of holiday drift, can be treated with an overhaul of the calendar to put all holidays but Easter firmly in one month or another. The bottom line here is that e-recording of transactions offers a new set of opportunities for studying the health of Main Street.

JEL-codes: C81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-03
Note: TWP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16897.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:nbr:nberwo:16897

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16897

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().