Employment reconciliation and nowcasting

Abstract

We construct a latent employment estimate for the United States, which both reconciles the information from separate payroll and household surveys and incorporates the preliminary data revision process of the payroll data. We find that our reconciled latent employment series looks somewhat different than the initial release of payroll employment and is closer to the fully revised data that is benchmarked to a near census of employment. A real-time exercise, however, suggests that the reconciled employment estimate is remarkably similar to the initial release of payroll employment with near zero weight on the household survey information.