The employment situation released this morning shows that 178,000 new jobs were added in November 2016. Monthly job gains and losses can indicate how the economy is doing once they are corrected to account for the pattern we already expect in a process called seasonal adjustment. The approach for this seasonal adjustment that is presently used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) puts very heavy weight on the current and last two years of data in assessing what are the typical patterns for each month. In my paper “Unseasonal Seasonals?” I argue that a longer window should be used to estimate seasonal effects. I ... (full story)