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Working Paper
Improving the Accuracy of Economic Measurement with Multiple Data Sources: The Case of Payroll Employment Data
This paper combines information from two sources of U.S. private payroll employment to increase the accuracy of real-time measurement of the labor market. The sources are the Current Employment Statistics (CES) from BLS and microdata from the payroll processing firm ADP. We briefly describe the ADP-derived data series, compare it to the BLS data, and describe an exercise that benchmarks the data series to an employment census. The CES and the ADP employment data are each derived from roughly equal-sized samples. We argue that combining CES and ADP data series reduces the measurement error ...
Working Paper
Introducing the Distributional Financial Accounts of the United States
This paper describes the construction of the Distributional Financial Accounts (DFAs), a new dataset containing quarterly estimates of the distribution of U.S. household wealth since 1989, and provides the first look at the resulting data. The DFAs build on two existing Federal Reserve Board statistical products --- quarterly aggregate measures of household wealth from the Financial Accounts of the United States and triennial wealth distribution measures from the Survey of Consumer Finances --- to incorporate distributional information into a national accounting framework. The DFAs complement ...
Working Paper
Validating Large Language Model Annotations
This paper proposes a validation framework for LLM-generated measurements when reliable benchmarks are unavailable. Validity is established by testing whether an LLM can reconstruct passages from annotated labels while maintaining semantic consistency with the original text. The framework avoids circular reasoning by establishing testable prerequisite properties that must be met for a validation to be considered successful. Application to news article data demonstrates that the framework serves as a practical alternative to human benchmarking, which offers advantages in objectivity, ...
Working Paper
Validating Large Language Model Annotations
This paper proposes a validation framework for LLM-generated measurements when reliable benchmarks are unavailable. Validity is established by testing whether an LLM can reconstruct passages from annotated labels while maintaining semantic consistency with the original text. The framework avoids circular reasoning by establishing testable prerequisite properties that must be met for a validation to be considered successful. Application to news article data demonstrates that the framework serves as a practical alternative to human benchmarking, which offers advantages in objectivity, ...
Working Paper
Tracking Labor Market Developments during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Preliminary Assessment
Many traditional official statistics are not suitable for measuring high-frequency developments that evolve over the course of weeks, not months. In this paper, we track the labor market effects of the COVID-19 pandemic with weekly payroll employment series based on microdata from ADP. These data are available essentially in real-time, and allow us to track both aggregate and industry effects. Cumulative losses in paid employment through April 4 are currently estimated at 18 million; just during the two weeks between March 14 and March 28 the U.S. economy lost about 13 million paid jobs. ...