This paper combines information from two sources of U.S. private payroll employment to increase the accuracy of real-time measurement of the labor market. The sources are the Current Employment Statistics (CES) from BLS and microdata from the payroll processing firm ADP. We briefly describe the...

Since 1979, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has nearly quadrupled the size of the sample used to estimate monthly employment changes. Although first-reported employment estimates are still noisy, the magnitude of sampling variability has declined in proportion to the increase in the sample...

This essay sets out a framework for evaluating empirical work in terms of the ability of the data to provide adequate parameter estimates and hypothesis tests about the true underlying structure. Problems of aggregation, representativeness and structural change are discussed in detail. These...

When the US Bureau of Labor Statistics releases new numbers, in theory it should make no difference whether the press release emphasizes the most recent 1-month number, which is what it always does, or the 12-month number, as many other countries' statistical agencies do. This paper offers the...

This paper documents that rotation group bias -- the tendency for labor force statistics to vary systematically by month in sample in labor force surveys -- in the Current Population Survey (CPS) has worsened considerably over time. The estimated unemployment rate for earlier rotation groups has...

In a famous paper, Kenneth Sokoloff argued that the labor input of entrepreneurs was generally not included in the count of workers in manufacturing establishments in the early censuses of manufacturing. According to Sokoloff, this biased downward econometric estimates of economies of scale if...

Good data on the size and composition of the independent contractor workforce are elusive, with household survey and administrative tax data often disagreeing on levels and trends. We carried out a series of focus groups to learn how self-employed independent contractors speak about their work....

Although the college-high school wage gap for younger men has doubled over the past 30 years, the gap for older men has remained nearly constant. We argue that these shifts reflect changes in the relative supply of highly-educated workers across age groups. Cohorts born in the first half of the...

In this paper, I examine the effect of business cycles on the employment, earnings, and income of persons in different demographic groups. I classify individuals by sex, education, and race. The analysis uses data from the Current Population Survey's Outgoing Rotation Group file, covering the...

I examine the specialization of US commuting zones in AI-related occupations over the 2000 to 2018 period. I define AI-related jobs based on keywords in Census occupational titles. Using the approach in Lin (2011) to identify new work, I measure job growth related to AI by weighting employment...