Last month I noted that despite local data points and expert opinions pointing to a slowdown in the retail industry, the California Employment Development Department reported that retail industry employment was growing at a fairly healthy pace. To explain this disparity, I offered the hypothesis that the "birth-death model," a statistical adjustment applied by the EDD in order to model the number of new businesses coming into existence, was overestimating the number of jobs being created by new businesses. (The prior article goes into vastly more detail, for those interested).
Today, the EDD released the January job data as well as revisions to the 2007 numbers. The revised numbers indicate that job growth in the retail sector — and overall, for that matter — was indeed quite a bit lower than the EDD had previously estimated.
