Discussion of Brittain, Lovell, and Early Reports

CHRISTOPHER SIMS and several other participants supported Lovell’s suggestion that standard errors reflecting both seasonal adjustment and sampling uncertainties be published along with the unemployment statistics. Sims further pointed out that the calculation of standard errors on the seasonal adjustment would require an explicit stochastic model of how the series were generated. Lacking agreement on such a model, the adjusted series and standard errors calculated from a number of alternative models of the process should be made available to users of the statistics.