employers in the middle of every month and produces an initial estimate that makes up the headline payrolls number of the jobs report. The agency subsequently provides two revisions to that estimate, as it collects more survey responses.
In any given month, many employers respond to the survey late or not at all. The BLS says its big revisions reflect a sharp drop in survey respondents during the pandemic, as often happens during times of economic turmoil.“You’re now asking companies to pony up economic data when they themselves are struggling to keep in business,” said Georgetown University professor Keith Hall, former head of the BLS.
When businesses don’t respond, the agency must guess their payroll size, said Cornell University’s Erica Groshen, who also previously headed the BLS. Often late survey responders are “biased” in one direction—they hired or fired en masse, Ms. Groshen said. When the agency finally collects their responses, it incorporates them into new estimates, leading to big revisions.
The BLS also routinely reaches out to new companies to join the survey sample, to keep up with changes in the types and size of companies that constitute the labor force. There, too, the agency has run into trouble. The share of companies agreeing to be surveyed—the so-called “initiation rate”—has fallen by half over the pandemic to 32% in October. This has led to a smaller sample size, which has likely led to more “noise,” or bigger swings in estimates and re-estimates, Ms. Groshen said.
“The evolution of the structure of the economy has accelerated because of the pandemic.” ~ Stephen Stanley, Amherst Pierpont The punctuated equilibrium model as applied to the economy.
Show your community , God, through your Actions ! Today you have a chance to Represent God or Satan. Your Choice , God is waiting and watching ! Guess who else is watching what you do and say !
there are no job gains lol 😂