U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Department of Labor Logo United States Department of Labor
Dot gov

The .gov means it's official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you're on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Bureau of Labor Statistics > Office of Survey Methods Research > Publications > Browse Research Papers

Back to the Future:Using Current Regression Variables to Forecast Forward from Historical Net Birth/Death Employment

Victoria Battista

Abstract

The Current Employment Statistics (CES) 2 program uses a birth/death model to account for changes in employment that are not captured in the CES sample. One part of this model, the net birth/death residual forecasts, has regularly added between 800,000 and 1,000,000 jobs to the CES employment level on an annual basis from 2003 to 2008. During the most recent recession, the birth/death residual dropped to less than 300,000, a change that was not picked up by the forecasting model and contributed to a very large benchmark revision. CES has been conducting research to determine if the CES birth/death model, based currently on historical time series, could benefit from the incorporation of an additional, more timely regression variable.