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Jason Furman Profile picture
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2 Jul, 4 tweets, 2 min read
I wrote this quickly and missed a big point: the "definitional differences" I acknowledged were a possibility were a *much* bigger deal than I had realized--@jdlahart makes this very important point.
So there may be a more coherent story here than I had realized but I'm not sure what it is:

--People shifting from self employed to jobs (BLS says self employment was down but only 165K)

--People getting multiple jobs (but BLS says this was down)

--Farm employment?

--Others?
Hopefully someone has figured this out already so I'll stop speculating, if I see reliable points on it I'll retweet them.

Enjoy the rest of your jobs day!
According to Goldman Sachs a big source of the discrepancy is a -350k (sa by GS) reduction of workers on unpaid leave which shows up in the household numbers. (They don't tweet so I can't retweet them.)

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More from @jasonfurman

Jason Furman Profile picture
2 Jul
My analysis of the jobs numbers, with Willie Powell. Short version: the pace of job growth picked up as signs continue to point to a tight labor market. A 🧵follows.
piie.com/blogs/realtime…
850,000 was a great jobs number but we're still 9m jobs short of trend. We should be able to narrow that gap relatively rapidly for several more months in a row (assuming no dramatic worsening of the virus situation).
The unemployment rate remains elevated. And the "realistic" unemployment rate, which includes the 2.1m people who have left the labor force above and beyond what one would have expected.
Read 7 tweets
Jason Furman Profile picture
2 Jul
The pace of *nominal* wage growth remains very rapid, although it slowed a little in June.

Over the last 3 months the annualized nominal wage growth was:

Private: 5.9% (or 7.1% adjusted for composition)

Production and nonsupervisory: 6.6% (or 7.8% adjusted for composition)
The compositional issue is that when lower-wage workers are added in larger numbers, like leisure and hospitality, that drives down the average because you are adding some lower-wage workers.

This tries to adjust for that by holding industry shares constant.
The numbers for June are:

Private: +0.3% (or 0.4% adjusted for composition)

Production and nonsupervisory: +0.4% (or 0.5% adjusted for composition)
Read 4 tweets
Jason Furman Profile picture
2 Jul
Two very different numbers in today’s report:

+850,000 jobs according to the payroll survey of employers

-12,000 employment according to surveyed workers

Most everyone is disregarding the second number. And most everyone is right. A short🧵
We studied this issue carefully at CEA and in our very last issue brief we concluded that the household survey was so noisy that it essentially provided no additional information relative on top of the payroll survey. obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/…
While there are definitional differences between payroll jobs and employment the large gap between them is likely because one (or both) was badly mismeasured due to noise, which is especially large right now. whitehouse.gov/cea/blog/2021/…
Read 4 tweets
Jason Furman Profile picture
1 Jul
I joined an inflation panel organized by @BudgetHawks yesterday. I'll do a short🧵summarizing my six points but watch it all for a broader set of perspectives--with various disagreements but a consensus that we should not be overconfident on this topic. dropbox.com/s/5fl91e93gzr5…
1. Before getting to inflation, the even more important issue is what is happening in the real economy. Remarkably the US is expected to be above pre-pandemic forecasts for real GDP by the end of the year--the only G7 country where this is expected. (Note, is a forecast.)
2. The United States has also had much more inflation than other countries. This says inflation is not just about reopening, supply chain issues, global commodity prices, base effects, etc., because they also have those in Germany and France.
Read 14 tweets
Jason Furman Profile picture
21 Jun
In one sense the claim that fiscal policy is going to become less expansionary is obviously true. In another sense it fails to make a critical point: fiscal policy will still be *very* expansionary.

A 🧵motivated by @Neil_Irwin (among others): nytimes.com/2021/06/21/ups…
The largest fiscal injections are now behind us. Together with the reopenings they have contributed to the very rapid GDP growth we had in 2020-Q3 and Q4 and so far this yr. And the very rapid growth we're likely to have in the coming quarters.
Cash payments and pandemic-curtailed services have contributed to a big increase in spending on goods which in turn has contributed to higher imports, lower inventories, and higher prices.

(Note, retail sales #s are mostly but not entirely goods.)
Read 11 tweets
Jason Furman Profile picture
21 Jun
Expanded version of our childcare paper on @nberpubs today, with @kearney_melissa and Willie Powell.

Finds that the differential impact on women with younger children explains ~1% of the labor market worsening from Jan/Feb-2020 to Jan/Feb-2021.

nber.org/papers/w28934?…
Our Q: how much of the 3.6pp decline in EPOP was due to childcare issues. Intuition for small result:

1. Women with younger children ~10% of workforce

2. Need to look at their *differential* reduction in work, not entire reduction

3. If you include father's goes the other way.
The @nberpubs version goes through many, many, many sensitivity tests with different control groups, different concepts, but keeps getting roughly the same result. Because even if #2 on the previous were 2X that would take the result from 1% to 2%. So robustness not surprising.
Read 8 tweets

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