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Discussion Paper
The Updated Employment Picture
Each year, typically with little fanfare, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases revisions to historical employment data. While you may wonder if this means that history gets rewritten, it's really about making written history more accurate. Revisions are standard practice for not only employment data, but also other economic data. Revisions incorporate more complete underlying data that become available over time, as well as updates to data estimation procedures (most economic data are not based on complete counts; instead, they're based on samples that are used to generate complete ...
Working Paper
Predicting Benchmarked US State Employment Data in Real Time
US payroll employment data come from a survey and are subject to revisions. While revisions are generally small at the national level, they can be large enough at the state level to alter assessments of current economic conditions. Users must therefore exercise caution in interpreting state employment data until they are “benchmarked” against administrative data 5–16 months after the reference period. This paper develops a state-space model that predicts benchmarked state employment data in real time. The model has two distinct features: 1) an explicit model of the data revision process ...