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150-200K federal workers exited payroll on Sept 30 (drp, not the shutdown) so BLS total NFP bound to be lower than -58K

The two sectors that fueled much job growth in 2024 were health care and (local) government. Health care growth is likely driven by demographics (older population demanding more care) so not surprising to see it bounce back. But public sector growth was sputtering out in the last few BLS reports.

Here's a recent note from one of the authors of that paper, saying, "Together the evidence suggests overall hiring has not declined meaningfully due to AI."

The more-or-less consensus view (among researchers looking at the impact of AI on labor demand) is that AI is unlikely impacting economic aggregates.

Demand for young workers is very cyclical so we would expect given the no-hire, no-fire economy that youth unemployment would be rising.

One of the challenges of using private sector data for monetary and fiscal policy is that access depends on the incentives of the firm sharing the data, and those incentives can change.

Another reason why it's a good idea for the public sector to provide economic data.

The entirety of BLS is furloughed until the government re-opens.

Before I led BLS I was not as acutely aware of how many businesses, firms, and individual jobs depend on a stream of public use data. One estimate is that the $2 billion the US spends on economic data creates a $200+ billion industry of 'data-intensive' businesses. pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...

Cool paper - so interesting that the explosion in homeschooling happened largely after the schools reopened.

Joey, you cannot post a pic of Alpacas in cute outfits hanging out in DC without letting the rest of know where this is happening so we can be there

Big picture, we do not know the exact answer to 'how good/bad is the ADP data if BLS data disappears?' but the private data providers themselves are pretty clear in every conference/panel that the quality of their own data will erode if they cannot benchmark to BLS estimates.

I think what Justin is trying to say here is that ADP uses BLS data in it's revision process to improve the correlation between the two series over time, but the correlation between the initial ADP estimate and BLS payroll growth is pretty low.

Depends on how venerable the site is if it can't be monitored or maintained, and if there are any contractors who can work on it while the feds are furloughed.

Given changes in the break-even pace of job gains due to changing immigration policy, the clearest signal of labor market strength right now is the unemployment rate. And ADP tells us nothing about the unemployment rate.

Self-employed workers are included in the CPS. It's about 10% of the workforce.

My one quibble is with the immigration point. I’ve never understood why they think there is a wedge there. But QCEW first estimate will be revised up; that’s been the pattern since the pandemic and UI modernization has put real strain on data collection there

The two series have very different seasonality.