ExpliStats Trend Estimates for May 2014
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics will publish the results of their Payroll Employment Survey for May 2014 on Friday, June 6th. Here are the mathematical trend numbers which are produced in advance by the ExpliStats modeling of the BLS seasonal adjustment process. The trends here are what could be expected for May, given the seasonally-adjusted BLS trends established through April.
For May 2014:
Total Non-Farm Payrolls to gain 235,000 jobs
Private Non-Farm Payrolls to gain 231,000 jobs
The bar chart on the right breaks out these numbers in to the various component industries.
Often, the eventual consensus outlook is close to the trend, but the consensus keeps changing up to the point of the new data release; the trend, however, is set based as of the prior month’s release. Even with the late revisions to the Consensus, though, the Trend Model is a better predictor of the headline payroll changes.
The current (June 3rd) average consensus figure for the change in Total Payrolls from economists polled by Bloomberg is for a gain of 213,000 jobs. The publicly available Bloomberg consensus detail is used here, as an example, for comparison purposes.
Comparison of past Trend Forecasts with other private surveys and with actual reported BLS payrolls.
In the two histograms below we compare the last few months’ of forecasts and estimates from:
– ExpliStats Trend
– BLS Actual Payroll Survey
– Consensus of Economists polled by Bloomberg
– The ADP Payroll Report (Private sector jobs only)
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For Total Payroll change, over the months December 2013 through April 2014, the ExpliStats Trend as a predictor of the actual BLS survey has been out, on average, by 43,000, while the Consensus average has been out by 70,000.
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For Private Payroll change, over the months December 2013 through April 2014, the ExpliStats Trend as a predictor of the actual BLS survey has been out, on average, by 38,000 while the Consensus average has been out by 56,000, and the ADP Payroll Report by 47,000.
Comparison of April Trend Forecasts with BLS Survey
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In the bar-chart to the left, the ExpliStats Trend forecasts for each industry is shown in red, and the actual, reported BLS figures in blue.
As can be seen, a number of small differences except for Government, Construction and Trade, Transportation & Utilities.
A closer look at that last industry shows that the Retail sub-sector exceeded trend by a sizeable margin.
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Next Month
We plan to produce and publish our June payrolls forecast very soon after the release of the BLS May numbers. Early publication of the analysis will be offered as a monthly service to subscribers. For a free, trial subscription offer, please join our mailing list if you have not already done so.