Editor's note: This article was originally published on Dec. 7, 2019 by Menzie Chinn here.
The trajectories of the BLS vs. ADP private nonfarm employment series differ, even though for much of the year, the ADP series was above that of BLS.
Figure 1: Private nonfarm payroll employment from BLS (blue), and from ADP (brown), and CES March preliminary benchmark revision (dark blue triangle), all on log scale. Light green shading denotes data to be benchmark revised. Source: BLS, ADP via FRED, BLS, and author's calculations.
The divergence in changes is even more