Did BLS change its method for estimating employment from business births and deaths in the disaster areas?
BLS and states have not made adjustments to normal birth/death estimation procedures. Under standard CES estimation procedures, sample units with a reported employment level of zero are excluded from estimate calculation. This is done as a method to offset new business birth employment which the survey is unable to capture on a real time basis. This technique is used because research has shown that in most months, employment gain from business births and employment loss from business deaths largely offset each other. Also the CES program adds a net birth/death employment adjustment, derived from a time series model, to account for the residual net of birth/death employment not captured by the technique described above.
