#NFPGuesses: A Recap and a year's summary
Payroll employment rises by 280,000 in May; unemployment rate essentially unchanged (5.5%) http://t.co/1Y9cSWJUIB #JobsReport #BLSdata
— BLS-Labor Statistics (@BLS_gov) June 5, 2015
Swing and a miss! But this time it’s a surprise in the opposite direction - I was 80,000 jobs too short.
Here’s what the distribution of guesses looked like for this month’s go-around:
One thing I’ve noticed is the remarkable consistency of the average guess. I’ve plotted out all of the rounds of #NFPGuesses from February to today, and notice how average has come out at around 225,000 each time.
May
April
March
February
As you can see, the average of guesses has been remarkably consistent, even when the actual numbers are not:
It looks like the median twitter armchair economist is consistent, and consistently optimistic. In an average month, an average twitter user will guess +222K, which is higher than the actual jobs figure of 205,400.
There might be a few reasons why this might be the case:
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This mid-winter dip coincides with severe weather in the Northeast, especially New England. It comes after a huge employment boom in autumn. So it is entirely possible, given a steady recovery and surprisingly disastrous conditions in a region, that tweeters would overestimate job growth.
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Other job data appears to be strong, which means that NFP data might be underwhelming, relative to expectations. For example, JOLTS data
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Finally, this may simply be a manifestation of optimism bias
I want to keep my blog fresh, but I might have another post or 2 with insights I’ve gathered from looking at this particular trend. So stay tuned!
