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September’s jobs report marks another month of positive growth

September’s jobs gains, released this morning, show that 156,000 new jobs were added in September, marking 72 straight months of positive jobs growth, dating back to October of 2010. This is slightly below the median of economists’ forecasts of 172,000, according to Bloomberg.

Monthly job gains and losses can indicate how the economy is doing once they are corrected to account for the pattern we already expect in a process called seasonal adjustment. The approach for this seasonal adjustment that is presently used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) puts very heavy weight on the current and last two years of data in assessing what are the typical patterns for each month.

In my paper “Unseasonal Seasonals?” I argue that a longer window should be used to estimate seasonal effects. I found that using a different seasonal filter, known as the 3×9 filter, produces better results and more accurate forecasts by emphasizing more years of data. The 3×9 filter spreads weight over the most recent six years in estimating seasonal patterns, which makes them more stable over time than the current BLS seasonal adjustment method.

I calculate the month-over-month change in total nonfarm payrolls, seasonally adjusted by the 3×9 filter, for the most recent month. The corresponding data as published by the BLS are shown for comparison purposes. According to the alternative seasonal adjustment, the economy added 129,000 jobs in September (column Wright SA), 27,000 fewer than the official BLS total of 156,000 (column BLS Official).

In addition to seasonal effects, abnormal weather can also affect month-to-month fluctuations in job growth. In my paper “Weather-Adjusting Economic Data” I and my coauthor Michael Boldin implement a statistical methodology for adjusting employment data for the effects of deviations in weather from seasonal norms. This is distinct from seasonal adjustment, which only controls for the normal variation in weather across the year. We use several indicators of weather, including temperature and snowfall.

We estimate that weather effects lowered job growth in September by 14,000 jobs (column Weather Effect). Our weather-adjusted total is thus higher than the official BLS total at 170,000 jobs (column Boldin-Wright SWA). Although September was slightly warmer than normal, unseasonably warm weather in the summer months added to prior job growth, resulting in a negative bounceback for September.

job numbers 10.7.16

a. Applies a longer window estimate of seasonal effects (see Wright 2013).
b. Includes seasonal and weather adjustments, where seasonal adjustments are estimated using the BLS window specifications (see Boldin & Wright 2015). The incremental weather effect in the last column is the BLS official number less the SWA number.


The author did not receive financial support from any firm or person for this article or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article. He is currently not an officer, director, or board member of any organization with an interest in this article.

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