Modifying State and Area Current Employment Statistics (CES) Birth / Death Methodology During Coronavirus Pandemic

• Activity Number: 147 - Health
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 8, 2022 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Government Statistics Section
• Author(s): Daniel McGregor * and Wendy Zhang and Michele Eickman Walker
• Companies: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
• Keywords: Current Employment Statistics (CES); Birth/Death Model; CES Benchmark Revision; Coronavirus impact on employment; employment estimation; industry employment

Abstract

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic had a huge impact on the labor market, leading to a breakdown in the historical relationship between business openings (births) and closings (deaths), thus breaking the assumptions underlying the BLS birth/death model, which is an important element of the normal BLS methodology. BLS subsequently modified the CES methodology to better reflect the effect of the contribution of business births and deaths to monthly payroll employment estimates. This paper examines the impacts of modifications to the birth/death methodologies on statewide industry-level employment estimates, as well as the correlation between employment estimates and the number of coronavirus cases in states with high infection rates. Results show that the modified procedure modestly improved the overall accuracy of monthly estimates, in turn reducing total benchmark revision.