KEY POINTS:
- Economists have estimated recent declines in employment.
- One estimate indicates 52.2% of Americans were employed in April.
- If this estimate is correct, the share of Americans employed is the lowest on record.
- The chart shows this estimated value for April along with historical data through March 2020.
ECONOMIST CORNER:
Official labor force metrics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) come out with a lag. However, a group of economists have constructed estimates intended to replicate the BLS methodology using higher-frequency private survey data. One labor force metric they estimated for April is the employment-to-population ratio. The metric indicates the percentage of America’s population that is employed. If their estimate is correct, the BLS data for April will show the lowest share of Americans employed ever recorded in the data, which start in January of 1948.