Daniel Zhao Profile picture
Feb 4, 2022 19 tweets 11 min read Read on X
Today's January #JobsReport is significantly stronger than expected. Job gains totaled 467,000 even as Omicron drove record high COVID cases. Unemployment ticked up to 4.0%

Huge payroll revisions too: Dec up to 510,000 from 199,000. Nov up to 647,000 from 249,000.

1/
Charts will be slow this morning, but 2 more things:
-Labor force participation ticks up to 62.2%
-Weekly hours were down 0.2 hrs, employee absence due to illness up to 3.6 million, a new record high; showing Omicron had impact even if it reverse slow jobs growth

#JobsReport 2/
Slipping in a few charts while I can: we added 467,000 jobs in January. In hindsight, the end of year slowdown no longer looks as dramatic. Despite Omicron now *and* Delta in the late fall, jobs growth stayed surprisingly strong.

#JobsReport 3/
Job gains were broad-based. Even COVID-sensitive sectors like leisure & hospitality added 151,000 jobs. #Retail (+61,400), transportation & warehousing (+54,200) saw large gains despite the end of the holiday season, perhaps as employers held onto temp workers.

#JobsReport 4/
The surge in payroll gains now leaves us 2.9 million short of pre-crisis levels (or -1.9%). But you can see visually how much revisions have helped the picture. Now seems like the job market recovery was plowing ahead through the last few months.

#JobsReport 5/
One place that the Omicron impact *did* show up is a drop in average weekly hours from 34.7 to 34.5 as Omicron rippled thru the workforce & employees worked less due to illness, quarantine, family obligations, etc.

#JobsReport 6/
Average hourly earnings rose 5.7 percent year-over-year, though unclear whether that might be due to compositional effects with lower-wage workers more exposed to COVID and more likely to work less during January

#JobsReport 7/
That being said, wage growth in leisure & hospitality—one of the most COVID-exposed sectors—for production & nonsupervisory workers moderated only slightly to 15% year-over-year.

#JobsReport 8/
On the household survey: the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.0 percent from 3.9 percent. Still fairly low and on the back of strong labor force participation gains (+0.3 pp to 62.2 percent). Employers are still hiring & workers are still looking.

#JobsReport 8/
Looking at it again, seems like most of the labor force participation gains are coming from the population revisions. So not so much that LFP rose last month; more that it was actually slightly stronger in 2021 than initially estimated

#JobsReport 10/
The Black unemployment rate fell to 6.9%, though improvement has been unsteady. Even now the Black unemployment rate is more than double the white unemployment rate for the 2nd month in a row.

#JobsReport 11/
And another place where Omicron impact is showing up is employee absences due to illness, which surged to a record high of 3.6 million in Jan. Even if Omicron is less severe, its wide spread still has an extremely disruptive impact on workers & businesses alike.

#JobsReport 12/
Now to some of the nitty-gritty... Benchmark revisions! Payroll employment for March 2021 was revised upward 374,000 despite initial estimates of -166,000. Basically, jobs growth was much smoother in 2021 than initially reported.

#JobsReport 13/
Alas, the benchmark revisions do mean that the >1 million job gains from last June have been revised away. But happy to "trade away" a 1-million-job month for a few extra hundred thousand jobs.

#JobsReport 14/
Here are the pre/post-revision numbers on an annual basis. 2020 and 2021 both slightly better than initially reported. 2021 saw 6.7 million gains (up from 6.4 million), a even higher record high.

#JobsReport 15/
Here are the revisions by industry. Some interesting notes:
-Government seasonal adjustments have been smoothed out! 🥳
-Weaker growth in leisure & hospitality than initial ly reported
-Transportation & warehousing on a tear

#JobsReport 16/
Look how smooth those seasonally adjusted education payrolls are now! (linked tweet has what the SA looked like prior to this week)



#JobsReport 17/
Accidentally skipped this chart earlier, but post-revisions, professional & business services + transportation & warehousing are now well above pre-pandemic levels. Job shortfalls are still heavily concentrated in leisure & hospitality, education, health care

#JobsReport 18/
#Remotework surged in January as Omicron pushed employers to reverse return-to-office plans.

Probably will be my last charts for today (but no promises)

#JobsReport 19/

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More from @DanielBZhao

Mar 4
Another drop for the @Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index in Feb, falling to 45.1%, down from 45.7% last month & 50.7% in Feb 2023, as recent layoffs in the headlines continue to drive anxiety among employees.

1/ Image
Discussions of layoffs in @Glassdoor reviews have skyrocketed over the last 2 yrs in tech & media. In tech, they're actually higher than even the worst of Covid.

Despite measured layoffs remaining low by historical standards, anxiety about layoffs remains high.

2/ Image
One partial explanation is that sentiment from current employees who mention layoffs in reviews (likely employees who survived a layoff) has seen a sharper drop than other groups as burnout & morale appear to be worsening.

3/ Image
Read 5 tweets
Feb 2
First #jobsreport of 2024! Wow, some surprisingly hot figures on the headline:
-Payroll growth beats at 353k
-Unemp at 3.7%
-Avg hourly earnings up to 4.5%

Lots of details to look at below the headlines

1/
(Sorry for delay, took some time to digest data)

Payrolls grew 353,000 in Jan, well past expectations. Dec & Jan both were much stronger than originally reported, though new seasonal trends around turn of year means the true underlying growth rate is probably a touch lower.

2/ Image
Payroll growth over 2023 came in at 3.1 million jobs added, lower than the recent Covid recovery years but faster than the pre-Covid years & comparable to 2014–2015.

The annual revisions reaffirm the strength of the job market in 2023

3/ Image
Read 12 tweets
Jan 5
Last #jobsreport of 2023 is solid though a mixed bag under the hood:
-Payrolls beat with 216,000 jobs added
-Unemployment flat at 3.7%, though with a tick down in LFP
-Avg hourly earnings ticks up to 4.1%

Charts to follow 1/
216,000 jobs added to payrolls in December is a solid number, right about average for 2023.

Over 2023, there were 2.7 million jobs added to payrolls, down from 2021–2 when there were more "reopening jobs" coming back but still the highest pre-pandemic jobs growth since 2015

2/
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Jobs growth in December was driven in large part by private education & health services (+74k) and government (+52k). Health care, education and government together accounted for almost 4 in 5 jobs created in H2 2023, a higher share than in the past few years.

3/
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Read 5 tweets
May 5, 2023
Job market defying gravity in April:

*253,000 jobs added, above expectations though big negative revisions to last 2 months
*Unemp drops to 3.4%. Black unemp at record low 4.7%
*Wage growth jumps to 4.4% YoY

There's still heat in the job market #JobsReport 1/
Employers added 253,000 jobs, a slower pace than much of 2022, but Feb & Mar were downwardly revised by 149,000. Post-revisions, the start of the year was much slower than originally reported, but job gains remain healthy.

#JobsReport 2/ Image
The unemployment rate ticked back down to 3.4%, tying the recovery low. Ties the pre-pandemic low from 2019 and before that, we hadn't seen that low level since 1969.

#JobsReport 3/ Image
Read 5 tweets
May 2, 2023
Job openings fell to 9,590,000 in March, down from 9,974,000 in Feb and the lowest since Apr 2021.

Falling job openings adds another data point in favor of a cooling job market.

#JOLTS 1/ Image
Job openings fell most sharply in some of the service sectors that have driven much of the recent jobs recovery:

Transportation, warehousing & utilities: -144,000
Professional & business services: -135,000
Retail trade: -84,000
Health care & social assistance: -71,000

#JOLTS 2/ Image
The most concerning figure from the #JOLTS report is the jump in layoffs & discharges, rising to 1,805,000 in March, near the pre-pandemic level after spending much of the last 2 years well below, amidst a historically hot job market.

3/ Image
Read 8 tweets
Apr 29, 2023
Very excited to be listening to Odd Lots live at #EconTwitterIRL Image
Like the discussion of competing on science vs execution vs China. US can compete on advanced science but less so on manufacturing at low cost. China executes best where science is mature. Clean tech is an important case where US is still playing catch-up

#EconTwitterIRL
And Dan Wang's impression is that China regards AI similarly to social media where it's a technology to control rather than an opportunity for productivity growth. Evidently Twitter doesn't improve productivity

#EconTwitterIRL
Read 6 tweets

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