Why is employment data seasonally adjusted?
A seasonal event is an event which occurs at the same time every year, and a data series that is affected by these events is said to exhibit seasonality. Christmas is a good example of a seasonal event; it occurs at the same time every year and affects economic series such as employment trends. Prior to December 25, retailers begin dramatically increasing their employment to account for the increase in shopping leading up to the holiday season. Then in January and February, retail employment declines as employers shed jobs that were established just for the Christmas season. This is something that occurs at the same time every year and can easily be seen by observing a graph of retail trade employment. However, since one of the main purposes of CES is to gauge the direction of the economy, it is necessary to remove the seasonal component in order to observe the underlying economic trend. During the seasonal adjustment process, the seasonal component is removed from CES employment data
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