IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/fip/fedlrv/y2007isepp433-446nv.89no.5.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

How well does employment predict output?

Author

Abstract

Economists, policymakers, and financial market analysts typically pay close attention to aggregate employment trends because employment is thought to be an important indicator of macroeconomic conditions. One difficulty is that there are two separate surveys of employment, which can diverge widely from one another, as the previous and current economic expansions demonstrate. The conventional wisdom is that, for assessing economic conditions, the survey that counts the number of jobs (establishment survey) is preferable to the survey that counts the number of people employed (household survey). However, results from a one-quarter-ahead forecasting exercise presented in this paper suggest that analysts should question whether employment is a useful indicator for predicting output growth.

Suggested Citation

  • Kevin L. Kliesen, 2007. "How well does employment predict output?," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 89(Sep), pages 433-446.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedlrv:y:2007:i:sep:p:433-446:n:v.89no.5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/review/07/09/Kliesen.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kevin L. Kliesen & Frank A. Schmid, 2006. "Macroeconomic news and real interest rates," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 88(Mar), pages 133-144.
    2. Kevin L. Kliesen & Frank A. Schmid, 2004. "Monetary policy actions, macroeconomic data releases, and inflation expectations," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 86(May), pages 9-22.
    3. Erica L. Groshen & Simon M. Potter, 2003. "Has structural change contributed to a jobless recovery?," Current Issues in Economics and Finance, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, vol. 9(Aug).
    4. Todd Clark & Michael McCracken, 2005. "Evaluating Direct Multistep Forecasts," Econometric Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 24(4), pages 369-404.
    5. George A. Kahn, 1993. "Sluggish job growth: is rising productivity or an anemic recovery to blame?," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, vol. 78(Q III), pages 5-25.
    6. Clark, Todd E. & McCracken, Michael W., 2001. "Tests of equal forecast accuracy and encompassing for nested models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 105(1), pages 85-110, November.
    7. Daniel Aaronson & Ellen R. Rissman & Daniel G. Sullivan, 2004. "Can sectoral reallocation explain the jobless recovery?," Economic Perspectives, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, vol. 28(Q II), pages 36-39.
    8. Kathryn Koenders & Richard Rogerson, 2005. "Organizational dynamics over the business cycle: a view on jobless recoveries," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 87(Jul), pages 555-580.
    9. Chinhui Juhn & Simon M. Potter, 1999. "Explaining the recent divergence in payroll and household employment growth," Current Issues in Economics and Finance, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, vol. 5(Dec).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kurose, Kazuhiro, 2009. "The relation between the speed of demand saturation and the dynamism of the labour market," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 20(2), pages 151-159, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Michael W. L. Elsby & Bart Hobijn & Aysegul Sahin, 2010. "The Labor Market in the Great Recession," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 41(1 (Spring), pages 1-69.
    2. Faberman, R. Jason, 2017. "Job flows, jobless recoveries, and the Great Moderation," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 152-170.
    3. Gabriel Chodorow-Reich & Johannes Wieland, 2020. "Secular Labor Reallocation and Business Cycles," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 128(6), pages 2245-2287.
    4. Sweder van Wijnbergen & Tim Willems, 2013. "Imperfect information, lagged labour adjustment, and the Great Moderation," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 65(2), pages 219-239, April.
    5. Li-Hsueh Chen & Zhen Cui, 2017. "Jobless Recovery and Structural Change: A VAR Approach," South Asian Journal of Macroeconomics and Public Finance, , vol. 6(1), pages 1-26, June.
    6. David Berger, 2012. "Countercyclical Restructuring and Jobless Recoveries," 2012 Meeting Papers 1179, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    7. Andrew Figura & William L. Wascher, 2008. "The causes and consequences of economic restructuring: evidence from the early 21st century," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2008-41, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    8. Johannes Wieland & Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, 2015. "Labor Reallocation and Business Cycles," 2015 Meeting Papers 339, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    9. Kevin x.d. Huang & Jie Chen & Zhe Li & Jianfei Sun, 2014. "Financial Conditions and Slow Recoveries," Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers 14-00004, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics.
    10. Driver, Ciaran & Trapani, Lorenzo & Urga, Giovanni, 2013. "On the use of cross-sectional measures of forecast uncertainty," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 29(3), pages 367-377.
    11. Giovanni Gallipoli & Gianluigi Pelloni, 2013. "Macroeconomic Effects of Job Reallocations: A Survey," Review of Economic Analysis, Digital Initiatives at the University of Waterloo Library, vol. 5(2), pages 127-176, December.
    12. Kenneth S. Rogoff & Vania Stavrakeva, 2008. "The Continuing Puzzle of Short Horizon Exchange Rate Forecasting," NBER Working Papers 14071, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. Clark, Todd E. & West, Kenneth D., 2007. "Approximately normal tests for equal predictive accuracy in nested models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 138(1), pages 291-311, May.
    14. Vivian, Andrew & Wohar, Mark E., 2013. "The output gap and stock returns: Do cyclical fluctuations predict portfolio returns?," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 26(C), pages 40-50.
    15. Gonçalves, Sílvia & McCracken, Michael W. & Perron, Benoit, 2017. "Tests of equal accuracy for nested models with estimated factors," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 198(2), pages 231-252.
    16. Jinzhu Chen & Prakash Kannan & Prakash Loungani & Bharat Trehan, 2012. "New evidence on cyclical and structural sources of unemployment," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, issue March, pages 1-23.
    17. Peter Reinhard Hansen & Allan Timmermann, 2015. "Equivalence Between Out‐of‐Sample Forecast Comparisons and Wald Statistics," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 83, pages 2485-2505, November.
    18. Todd E. Clark & Michael W. Mccracken, 2014. "Tests Of Equal Forecast Accuracy For Overlapping Models," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(3), pages 415-430, April.
    19. Firmin Doko Tchatoka & Qazi Haque, 2023. "On bootstrapping tests of equal forecast accuracy for nested models," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(7), pages 1844-1864, November.
    20. Clark, Todd E. & McCracken, Michael W., 2015. "Nested forecast model comparisons: A new approach to testing equal accuracy," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 186(1), pages 160-177.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Employment forecasting;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedlrv:y:2007:i:sep:p:433-446:n:v.89no.5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Scott St. Louis (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbslus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.