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@mikemadowitz and I had a productive conversation about this data.
It turns out, the disparity in marriage employment *counts* is mostly an artifact of something else going on in the household survey entirely. /1 https://twitter.com/mikemadowitz/status/1313439549809397760">https://twitter.com/mikemadow...
It turns out, the disparity in marriage employment *counts* is mostly an artifact of something else going on in the household survey entirely. /1 https://twitter.com/mikemadowitz/status/1313439549809397760">https://twitter.com/mikemadow...
Namely, look at what& #39;s happened to the number of married men and women reported in the household survey during the pandemic: a rapid rise in February, and then a fall after June. /2
So a great deal of the declines in employment *counts* for married men and women in the household survey is explained by the declines in just the number of married people the survey shows in the first place. /3
Is this actually what& #39;s going on? Were there 1 1/2 million shotgun weddings during the early pandemic, and then a surge of divorces thereafter? Well, maybe... stranger things have happened in the last 8 months (like a penny shortage). But there& #39;s another explanation. /4
Another explanation is that response rates fell in the household survey during the pandemic, mainly because in-person interviews for the survey were cancelled, and this resulted in a bias in the population being captured by the CPS. /5
When survey responses deviate from what BLS knows to be the makeup of the population, they use survey weights to try to correct for the disparities. But BLS doesn& #39;t appear to correct for marriage rates. We can still see the surge in marriage rates even without survey weights. /6
This all makes sense by the way -- marriage is not immutable, so BLS may not feel they have a stable, reliable benchmark estimate of the married population with which to fully correct for response differences by marriage. /7
But it also means that the household survey may have been *overestimating* the number of married people throughout this pandemic. That overcount peaked in June, and has been correcting itself since then. /8
If true, that means that if you looked at a *count* at the *number* of married employed people since June, it would look like it was declining sharply, when in fact all that& #39;s happening is CPS response rates are gradually returning back to normal, with more single people. /9
One way to adjust for much (though not necessarily all) of this potential sample issue is to look at employment *rates* among married men and women -- that is, as a percent of their respective populations. /10
Here are what employment *rates* for married men and women look like in level terms (I& #39;m using non-seasonally-adjusted data so that this isn& #39;t confounded by the potential population count problems).
Both grew by +0.3pp in September. /11
Both grew by +0.3pp in September. /11
And here& #39;s how both have evolved since February 2020.
Married male EPOP is -3.3pp below February levels. For women, it& #39;s -3.9pp. The gender disparity has closed only slightly... married women were -0.9pp further behind men in April. /12
Married male EPOP is -3.3pp below February levels. For women, it& #39;s -3.9pp. The gender disparity has closed only slightly... married women were -0.9pp further behind men in April. /12
And both rates have grown modestly since June.
None of this is to say that there aren& #39;t important differences in the labor market by marriage, but there& #39;s a risk given the broader survey response issues that *changes in counts* of married people will overstate these. /13
None of this is to say that there aren& #39;t important differences in the labor market by marriage, but there& #39;s a risk given the broader survey response issues that *changes in counts* of married people will overstate these. /13
Let me end by saying: in walking through all of this with @mikemadowitz beforehand, he was a model of patience, intellectual curiosity, and valuing rigor in the data above all. Everyone interested in economic data should follow him. /FIN
Two links to add in addendum.
One is a @BLS_gov overview of how the CPS works, including weighting. H/t @Brett_Matsumot0
The other is an excellent paper from Jason Ward & @keds_economist going deeper into CPS response issues.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.pdf
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_h... href=" https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA842-1.html">https://www.rand.org/pubs/work...
One is a @BLS_gov overview of how the CPS works, including weighting. H/t @Brett_Matsumot0
The other is an excellent paper from Jason Ward & @keds_economist going deeper into CPS response issues.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.pdf
https://www.rand.org/pubs/work..." title="Two links to add in addendum. One is a @BLS_gov overview of how the CPS works, including weighting. H/t @Brett_Matsumot0 The other is an excellent paper from Jason Ward & @keds_economist going deeper into CPS response issues. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_h... href=" https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA842-1.html">https://www.rand.org/pubs/work..." class="img-responsive" style="max-width:100%;"/>
