Site Updates

Posted Sunday, March 21 2010

The front page has been quiet as of late, but there's been a lot going on within the site. I've added a bunch of new data to the unemployment pages. National, state and metro level unemployment data now include employment numbers as well. You can see the trend in employment for each geographic division as well as the monthly number of jobs gained or lost.

I've also added a new page to track GDP and employment — the two primary metrics that the NBER uses to determine recession start and end dates. This project fell out of the previous post Should We Classify GDP Recessions and Jobs Recessions Separately? which looked at the historical relationship between GDP and jobs during recessions after 1970. Since the current recession appears to be leading to a divergence in employment and GDP once again, I thought it'd be informative to track the two measures side by side to see how long the peak to trough period for each is. I happen to like using these two metrics to define recession end dates a bit more systematically. This data will be updated monthly on the same calendar as the national unemployment information.

Finally, I've added zip code level data to the NYC monthly sales price data. I think I'm happy with the aggregates that I've calculated thus far. The next addition to the NYC data will probably involve dives into individual property statistics, but that won't appear for a couple of months yet. I'm going to let the current data simmer for a bit first to see if there's anything else worth exploring before I dig into the individual data further.