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A 2010 effort for Arab-American men to fill out their census forms.
The April jobs report could be unusually strong, in a way that doesn’t say much about the underlying health of the U.S. economy.
It’s well known that the Census Department hires thousands of temporary workers in years ending with a zero to conduct its once-a-decade, well, census. What’s less well known is that the Census Department also does a mini version of this hiring a year before the actual head count, in preparation of the gigantic undertaking.
The agency calls this “in-field address canvassing,” which is the process of having staff visit different areas to identify every place where people live or could live. They then compare that to the existing census address list, or the less glamorous, “in-office address canvassing.”
Think of it like a dry run.
The effects of the dry-run hiring, if you will, have been substantial in the past. In the run-up to the 2000 Census, such hiring rose to about 40,000 per month. Before the 2010 Census, the hiring was quicker, amounting to a bump as high as 129,000 jobs in a single month.
The Census Bureau hires thousands of workers one year before the decennial census.
Jim O’Sullivan of High Frequency Economics and the winner of MarketWatch’s forecaster of the year for eight years in a row, estimates that in April, the Census hired 40,000 temporary workers.
That’s why his estimate of nonfarm payrolls growth is 240,000. The MarketWatch consensus is 217,000, which is significantly above the Bloomberg News survey, which on Thursday was reported by the news agency to be “just above 180,000”. If economists don’t factor in the Census Bureau’s hiring, their estimates will naturally be much lower.
The MarketWatch consensus — which is only drawn from the forecasts of the 15 economists who have scored the highest in our contest over the past 12 months as well as the winner of the forecaster of the month — usually doesn’t have such a wide gap compared with the broader Bloomberg survey.
Stephen Stanley, chief economist of Amherst Pierpont Securities, also noted the phenomenon as he advised clients to focus on the private-sector payrolls count, which he estimates will be 185,000.
The Labor Department will report the nonfarm payrolls figures on Friday at 8:30 a.m. Eastern.
U.S. stocks DJIA, -0.46% dropped sharply Thursday heading into the report. Fresh off a Federal Reserve meeting where policymakers didn’t give interest-rate hints in either direction, the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury TMUBMUSD10Y, +0.57% rose to 2.55%.
