With Thursday's weekly jobless claims report, the Labor Department updated the methodology used to seasonally adjust the initial claims and the so-called continued claims data. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the unemployment insurance claims series used multiplicative factors to seasonally adjust the data.
"For consistency, the published seasonal factors are presented as multiplicative with additive factors converted to implicit multiplicative factors and will not be subject to revision," the department said in a statement. "Now that the pandemic impacts on the UI claims series are clearer, modifications have been made to the outlier sets in the seasonal adjustment models for both of the claims series.
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped 18,000 to a seasonally adjusted 228,000 for the week ended April 1. Data for the prior week was revised to show 48,000 more applications received than previously reported.The government revised the claims series from 2018. It updated seasonal factors for 2023 and revised factors for 2018 through 2022.
"The claims data signal recent softening in the labor market," said Daniel Silver, an economist at JPMorgan in New York. "That said, the most recent levels are still pretty low by broad historical standards, which indicates that conditions in the labor market are not particularly weak."
Most have moved onto other social services programs that are not included in the unemployment roles