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August 27th, 2006This page exists for you to comment on the Payroll Employment Game. Please tell us what you like, what you didn’t like, what you can suggest to make it more fun, more accurate, more helpful. We hope you’ve had fun, learned something, and will play again. Thanks for your feedback!
August 27, 2006 at 11:13 am
I heard that you guys were talking about me. Anyone wanting my help has to pay, just like the Dukes did.
August 31, 2006 at 6:02 pm
How does one account for the Birth Death adjustment in the Payroll Game?
August 31, 2006 at 6:59 pm
Thanks to Barry Ritholtz for stopping by to comment. Everyone should be checking out his site as we suggested on the homework page. He has done a lot of analysis of the payroll employment report and comparison to the household survey. It is an excellent resource. At the moment, we are only illustrating the effect of sampling error. He is quite correct in pointing out that there is an impact from the BLS birth/death model. There are other adjustments — seasonal and benchmarking. There are also two revisions to the original report.
If people like the game, we may add other interesting features. For now, we have started with a simple but important concept.
November 1, 2006 at 7:16 pm
Interesting game. Regarding the birth-death adjustment, I believe it has a large impact on the non-seasonally adjusted numbers, but since the seasonal adjustment gets applied on top, it doesn’t seem to have the same effect, because they are smoothing out seasonal variations to try to pick up an underlying trend. (FWIW, the sum of the nonseasonally adjusted last 12 months is usually pretty close to the seasonally adjusted last twelve months.)
Practically, what the seasonal sadjustment means is that when a new nonseasonally adjusted number comes, and it is a big change from the trend, the seasonal adjustment reduces the level of change, and adjusts prior months for the difference, in order to smooth out the rough reality.
Like Barry, I also write for RealMoney.com.