Comparing unadjusted and seasonally adjusted private employment from CES with QCEW and ADP.
Looking at the unadjusted data, the CES data is 637,000 higher than the June 2022 QCEW; 837,000 higher than the November 2022 ADP.
figure 1: Changes in private nonfarm payrolls (blue), US employment covered by private QCEW (red) and ADP private nonfarm payrolls (green) relative to March 2022 = 0 are not seasonally adjusted and are 0. resource: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBLS and ADP are calculated by FRED and athor.
In terms of percentages, the gap is small; the CES series is 0.6 percentage points higher than June’s QCEW and 0.5 percentage points higher than November’s.
figure 2: Private Nonfarm Payrolls (blue), US Employment Covered by Private QCEW (red), and ADP Private Nonfarm Payrolls are unseasonally adjusted, logarithmic, March 2022 = 0. resource: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBLS and ADP are calculated by FRED, and athor.
Finally, for the seasonally adjusted data, we have the following plot:
image 3: Relative to 2022M03=0, the changes in US private nonfarm payrolls (blue), private QCEW covered employment (red) and ADP private nonfarm payrolls are all zero. The authors adjusted QCEW using log transformation, census transformation X-13, and X-11 seasonal adjustment. resource: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBLS and ADP are calculated by FRED and athor.
As of June, 433,000 CES series the following QCEW series, while the CES series is 297,000 higher than the ADP series in November 2022. However, it is true that QCEW data are sensitive to the way seasonal adjustments are applied (Census X13/Seasonally Adjusted X-11 vs Moving Geometric Mean).
