A couple of months ago, NBER released an working paper by Bruce Sacerdote disputing the finding of official statistics that median and lower income households haven’t had any growth in real wages over the last 40+ years. The measurement problem revolves around bias in the price indexes used for deflating nominal income. There’s a lot to …
Read More In search of a price index for household income
One of the most important issues in recent U.S. macroeconomic performance is the productivity slowdown. Since 2004, U.S. labor productivity has slowed dramatically. From 2004 Q1 to 2017 Q1, real output per hour of the nonfarm business sector growth has averaged 1.3 percent per year. In contrast, during the preceding 9 years (from 1995 Q1 …
Read More Symposium on measures of economic growth
This morning, the Trump Administration released a “Blueprint” for its first Budget, which proposes dramatic cuts and restructuring of non-defense discretionary spending. Of course, I immediately searched the document for the impact on federal statistics. Although the document runs 62 pages, it’s really just a CliffsNotes version of the full budget, which will run hundreds …
Read More Reading between the lines: What Trump’s Budget Blueprint may mean for funding statistics
At 8:30 am tomorrow (March 10), BLS will release the “Employment Situation” for February. I expect most of the media attention will focus on whether U.S. employment growth accelerated or decelerated in the first month of the Trump administration—Trump has already tweeted about an ADP jobs report that was above expections. (ADP is a private-sector payroll services …
Read More How reliable are the employment/unemployment data? Standard errors and mean absolute revisions