Miscellaneous Updates

Posted Monday, March 19 2012

It's been a while since I've done a roundup of site changes here on the blog. While things can sometimes appear quiet on the surface, I'm usually working on refining existing pages on the site or introducing new ones. Within the last couple of months there have been some enhancements that you might have missed.

First off, I've started using the BLS' new Smooth Seasonally Adjusted metro area estimates for metro unemployment data. This is nice because it allows us to compare metro unemployment rates to national and state unemployment rates as well as to each other. Previously the metro data was distributed solely in a non-seasonally adjusted form which made anything but year-over-year comparisons difficult.

In addition to the new unemployment data, I've also updated the income section of the site. I'm now using the American Community Survey's 1-year data to report real median household income (and soon other income metrics) for metros, states and the nation as a whole. Combined with the metro unemployment and metro jobs data, I think this relatively new ACS data will be extremely telling as we observe the recovery from a local and household-based perspective.