Web-Appendix: On the Demographic Adjustment of Unemployment



Regis Barnichon† and Geert Mesters‡ November 22, 2016

Abstract In this web-appendix we present additional details for the empirical study in Barnichon & Mesters (2016). In particular, we discuss the construction of the worker transition rates and various ways to study the potential classification error in these transition rates.

JEL classification: J6, E24 Keywords: accounting, demographics, stock-flow, unobserved components, dynamic factor models.



† Regis Barnichon: San Francisco Fed, CREI, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and CEPR, email: [email protected]. Barnichon acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (grant ECO2011-23188), the Generalitat de Catalunya (grant 2009SGR1157) and the Barcelona GSE Research Network. ‡ Geert Mesters: Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Barcelona GSE, email: [email protected]. Mesters acknowledges support from the Marie Curie FP7-PEOPLE-2012-COFUND Action. Grant agreement no: 600387. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors are our own.

1

Introduction

In this web-appendix we present additional details for the empirical study in Barnichon & Mesters (2016). In particular, we discuss the construction of the worker transition rates and various ways to study the potential classification error in these transition rates.

2

Construction of worker transition rates

This appendix describes our procedure to construct time series for the six hazard rates of each demographic group. Since the procedure is identical for each group, we omit demographic subscript for clarity of exposition. After matching the CPS micro files over consecutive months, we can construct monthly transition probabilities for the six flows. We then operate three corrections to these transition probabilities. First, we correct the transition probabilities for 1994 CPS redesign, then for time-aggregation bias following Shimer (2012) and Elsby, Hobijn & ahin (2015), and finally we correct for margin error following Poterba & Summers (1986).1 We do not correct for classification error in our baseline specification (given the absence of a preferred correction method), but in the next section we explore the sensitivity of our results to using a classification error correction procedure. As shown by Abraham and Shimer (2001), the 1994 redesign of the CPS (see e.g., Polivka & Miller (1998)) caused a discontinuity in some of the transition probabilities in the first month of 1994. To adjust the series for the redesign, we proceed as follows. We start from the monthly transition probabilities obtained from matched data for each demographic group, and we take the post-redesign transition probabilities as the correct ones. The goal is then to correct the pre-94 value for the redesign. To do so, we estimate a VAR with the six hazard transition probabilities in logs estimated over 1994m1-2010m12, and we use the model to back-cast the 1993m12 transition probabilities.2 With these 1993m12 values in hand, we obtain corrected transition probabilities over 1976m2-1993m12 by adding to the original probability series the difference between the original value in 1993m12 and the 1

The correction for margin error restricts the estimates of worker flows to be consistent with the evolution of the corresponding labor market stocks. 2 The number of lags were chosen to maximize out-of-sample forecasting performances. A similar VAR is used in Barnichon & Nekarda (2012) to forecast the six flow rates.

2

inferred 1993m12 value. By eliminating the jumps in the transition probabilities in 1993m12, we are assuming that the discontinuities were solely caused by the CPS redesign. Thus, the validity of our approach rests on the fact that 1994m1 was not a month with large “genuine” shocks to the transition probabilities. Reassuringly, looking at other dataset that were not affected by the CPS redesign shows indeed no major discontinuity in 1994m1. First, the unemployment exit rate and unemployment entry rate computed from unemployment duration data, which were not affected by the CPS redesign (Shimer (2012) and Solon, Michaels & Elsby (2009), show no major discontinuity in 1994m1.3 Second, the employment-population ratio computed with data from the Census Employment Survey (which was unaffected by the CPS redesign) shows no evidence of any discontinuity in 1994m1 (Abraham and Shimer, 2001).

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Adjustments for classification error

As emphasized by Abowd & Zellner (1985), Poterba & Summers (1986) and more recently Elsby et al. (2015), gross worker flows are sensitive to classification error in the observed labor market states, since classification errors can lead to spurious transitions and thus errors in the measured transition rates. Since our demographic-adjustment procedure is based on worker flows, it is important to assess the sensitivity of our conclusions to classification error. In this section, we consider the effect of adding a classification error adjustment step in our demographic-adjustment procedure. Specifically, when constructing the worker flows from micro data, we include a classification error correction step in conjunction with our margin error adjustment. The literature has come up with three main approaches to correct for classification errors: (i) relying on re-interview surveys to measure the classification error rate (Abowd & Zellner (1985), Poterba & Summers (1986)), (ii) recoding the back-and-forth transitions between N and U (Elsby et al. (2015)), and (iii) using a general measurement error approach (Feng & Hu (2013)). We subsequently follow Elsby et al. (2015) and consider the effects of using methods (i) 3

Specifically, Shimer (2012) and Solon et al. (2009) use data from the first and fifth rotation group, for which the unemployment duration measure (and thus their transition probability measures) was unaffected by the redesign.

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and (ii). While (iii) is arguably superior to (i) and (ii), the procedure is too demanding in terms of data availability for correcting worker flows disaggregated by demographic groups.4 Abowd and Zellner (AZ) correction Using data from a sub-sample of the individuals in the CPS that were re-interviewed one month after the initial survey,5 Abowd & Zellner (1985) and Poterba & Summers (1986) estimated the classification error matrix E that contains the probability that an individual ˆ Uˆ and N ˆ the with true labor market state i is recorded as being in state j. Denoting E, measured number of employed, unemployed and nonparticipants, and E, U and N their true counterparts, they posit that 







     ˆ   U  =    ˆ N t |

1 − εEU − εEN

εU E

εN E

εEU

1 − εU E − εU N

εN U

εEN

εU N {z

1 − εN E − εN U

E





E      U  .   N t }

Then, with the matrix of the true number of workers transiting from state A to B in {E, U, N } in month t given by 

EE U E N E   Nt =  EU U U N U  EN U N N N

    ,  t

ˆ t satisfy N ˆ t = ENt E0 , so that one can infer the matrix of corrected the measured flows N flows from  ˆ t E−1 0 . Nt = E−1 N 4 Although Feng and Hu’s method focuses on the measurement of stocks (e.g., unemployment rate and participation rate), it can be extended to the measurement of flows. Unfortunately, the approach then becomes very demanding in terms of transition data –requiring notably information on worker transitions over 8 month intervals–, which make its implementation difficult with CPS worker flow data disaggregated in 11 demographic groups. 5 The re-interview survey only covers December 1976 through December 1982.

4

DeNUNinification The AZ correction method makes the strong assumption that the classification error matrix is time invariant and is the same today as it was 35 years ago. We thus consider an alternative procedure from Elsby et al. (2015) that does not make this assumption. Elsby et al. propose to recode the individuals that alternate between unemployment and non-participation. Specifically, drawing on Abowd and Zellner’s insight that the bulk of misclassification error occurs between unemployment and non-participation, their approach identifies individuals whose measured labor market state cycles between unemployment and nonparticipation from month to month. By using the panel dimension of the CPS, it is possible to follow an individual for four consecutive months and observe transitions that involve such cycles; in particular, the reversal of a transition from U to N or from N to U. The procedure of Elsby et al. (2015) then consists of “deNUNinfying” the worker flows, by recoding suspicious labor market states in order to eliminate cycles between U and N.

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Results As a preliminary step, Figure A1 plots the unemployment rates obtained with the different classification error correction methods (before any demographic adjustment) and contrasts it with the published unemployment rate. As previously found by Elsby et al. (2015), the AZ correction method induces a modest adjustment of the level of the unemployment rate, while the deNUNification procedure leaves the unemployment rate basically unchanged. Note also that the cyclical or low-frequency fluctuations are little affected by the correction procedures. Next, Figure A2 plots the demographic-adjusted unemployment rate for (i) our baseline demographic-adjustment without classification error correction (the case presented in the paper), (ii) a demographic-adjustment procedure that incorporates an AZ correction step, and (iii) a demographic-adjustment procedure that includes a deNUNification step. To put into perspective the effects of the classification error procedures, Figure A2 also shows the actual unemployment rate. In Figure A2, all the unemployment rates are demeaned to ease comparability across the different correction methods. We can see that the classification error 6 Specifically, the procedure recodes the following sequence of four months transitions: NNUN as NNNN, NUNN as NNNN, ENUN as ENNN, .NUN as .NNN, NUN. as NNN., UUNU as UUUU, UNUU as UUUU, EUNU as EUUU, UNUE as UUUE, .UNU as .UUU and UNU. as UUU., where a “.” denote a missing observation.

5

methods have little effect on our demographic-adjusted unemployment rate. The reason is that while spurious transitions can affect the level of the flows, they have overall little effect on their low-frequency movements, and as a result our procedure identifies the same slowmoving group changes regardless of whether we correct for classification error or not.

References Abowd, J. M. & Zellner, A. (1985), ‘Estimating gross labor-force flows’, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics 3, 254–283. Barnichon, R. & Mesters, G. (2016), ‘On the demographic adjustment of unemployment’. Working paper. Barnichon, R. & Nekarda, C. (2012), ‘The ins and outs of forecasting unemployment: Using labor force flows to forecast the labor market’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity . Elsby, M. W., Hobijn, B. & ahin, A. (2015), ‘On the importance of the participation margin for labor market fluctuations’, Journal of Monetary Economics 72, 64 – 82. Feng, S. & Hu, Y. (2013), ‘Misclassification Errors and the Underestimation of the US Unemployment Rate’, American Economic Review 103, 1054–1070. Polivka, A. & Miller, S. (1998), The CPS After the Redesign: Refocusing the Economic Lens, in J. Haltiwanger, M. Manser & R. Topel, eds, ‘Labor Statistics and Measurement Issues’, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Poterba, J. M. & Summers, L. H. (1986), ‘Reporting Errors and Labor Market Dynamics’, Econometrica 54(6), 1319–38. Shimer, R. (2012), ‘Reassessing the Ins and Outs of Unemployment’, Review of Economic Dynamics 15, 127–148. Solon, G., Michaels, R. & Elsby, M. W. L. (2009), ‘The Ins and Outs of Cyclical Unemployment’, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 1(1), 84–110.

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12 Unadj. AZ de−NUN

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ppt

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Figure 1: Unemployment rate: unadjusted and adjusted for spurious transitions.

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12 DFM−adjusted UR DFM with AZ DFM with de−NUN UR

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ppt

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Figure 2: Demographic-adjusted unemployment rate: unadjusted and adjusted for spurious transitions.

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Web-Appendix: On the Demographic Adjustment of ...

Nov 22, 2016 - Geert Mesters: Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Barcelona GSE, email: .... Specifically, drawing on Abowd and Zellner's insight that the bulk of.

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