As a Harvard University graduate student in the 1980s, Katharine Abraham tried to fill a hole in U.S. economic data by piecing together an estimate of labor demand, essentially a best guess of the number of open jobs in the country.
She drew from a patchwork of data, including surveys some states had conducted, a bit of information from the manufacturing sector, and even a pinch of data from Canada.
But it is having a moment, with a track record now long enough that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has made the JOLTS job vacancy estimate a touchstone in how he views the labor market and, as a result, the possible course of interest rates.
But that is a broad and blunt statistic. In recent years, researchers have looked for supplements, in particular to data like JOLTS, to provide more nuance about job market dynamics. The current survey was designed to make it easy on businesses and encourage responses, with a one-page form that asks for six pieces of data.
An expanded JOLTS survey may get directly at that and other issues in the future, said Paul R. Calhoun Jr., who was involved with developing the survey in the 1990s and is its current manager.
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