Federal Reserve Economic Data

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Long-term trends in car and light truck sales

Posted on March 15, 2021

The FRED graph above tracks vehicle sales in the United States since 1976. Despite a substantial increase in population, the general trend of vehicle sales is surprisingly flat. But the composition has changed: The proportion of automobiles (in purple and green) has decreased significantly in favor of light trucks and SUVs (in blue and red).

The FRED graph below tracks the same data, but the series are ordered differently: foreign vehicles on the top and domestic vehicles at the bottom. This reordering doesn’t change anything, but it does illuminate the increase in the share of light trucks and SUVs over cars—which occurred among domestic and foreign vehicles alike.

Finally, these trends hide considerable churn: The automobile industry is especially susceptible to recessions, like all sectors that produce investment goods. But we can see the pandemic recession is special, given that the deep drop in sales lasted for only a short period compared with other recessions.

How these graphs were created: Search for “car sales” on FRED, then look for the release table below the graph. There, check the series to display and click “Add to Graph.” Start the graph in 1976, when all series are available. From the “Edit Graph” panel, use the “Format” tab to change the graph type to a normally stacked area and change the order of the series to suit tastes.

Suggested by Christian Zimmermann.

View on FRED, series used in this post: DAUTOSAAR, DLTRUCKSSAAR, FAUTOSAAR, FLTRUCKSSAAR

What happened to the median wage in 2020?

The power of the composition effect

Posted on March 11, 2021

Our first FRED graph traces the evolution of the median weekly wage in the United States. See the spike in 2020? Does this huge increase mean everyone got a huge raise? No, it does not. As we’ll try to show in this post, the so-called composition effect is misleading us here.

We’ve discussed the composition effect before, which is basically that group averages can mask true individual experiences.

Our second graph shows employment for various education levels, excluding non-salaried workers: We see that more education made it less likely to lose a job in 2020.

The third graph shows the number of employed people by education, including non-salaried workers: All categories decreased, but the decreases were disproportionally larger for the less educated.

The second and third graphs show us where that composition effect kicks in: After losing more low-wage jobs than high-wage jobs, the median wage had to go up. Remember: With a median, in this case median wage, half the jobs are above and half are below. If you remove more jobs from the bottom half than the top half, the median wage will rise.

How these graphs were created: For all graphs, start at the Weekly and Hourly Earnings from the Current Population Survey release tables and navigate to the table of interest. Check the series you want to display and click “Add to Graph.”

Suggested by Christian Zimmermann.

View on FRED, series used in this post: LEU0252881600Q, LEU0252916400Q, LEU0252917000Q, LEU0252918800Q, LEU0252919400Q, LEU0254929100Q, LNS12027659, LNS12027660, LNS12027662, LNS12027689

The educational and health services sector is no longer recession-proof

Posted on March 4, 2021

The FRED Blog has discussed how resilient the educational services industry has been to recessions: Employment levels in schools and colleges in New York City and California, for example, decreased at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic but bounced back mid-year.* With 2020 behind us, we use the Employment Situation data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to revisit this topic.

The FRED graph above shows that since 1991, when data for educational services employment first became available, the year-to-year percent change in the number of persons employed has been positive in all but two years: 1992 and 2020. While the U.S. economy wasn’t in recession during any part of 1992, overall economic activity did contract starting in February 2020. That contraction resulted in a net loss of employment in educational services, health care, and social services for the year as a whole.

To go further back in time than 1991, we can examine data for the combined educational and health services supersector. Although educational and health services did not register the largest loss in annual employment among all the service industries in 2020, it did decrease for the first time since 1940. Stay tuned to the FRED Blog as we continue to monitor the wealth of FRED data during the rebound in economic activity expected for 2021.

* Revisit this July 30 FRED Blog post and click-and-drag on the graphs to expand the timeline.

How this graph was created: From FRED’s main page, browse data by “Release.” Search for “Employment Situation” and navigate the release table menus until you reach “Current Employment Statistics (Establishment Data): Table B-1. Employees on nonfarm payrolls by industry sector and selected industry detail, Seasonally adjusted.” From there, check the boxes next to “Educational services,” “Health care,” and “Social assistance” and click on “Add to Graph.” Next, edit the graph by selecting “Edit Line 1.” Change the units to “Percent Change from Year Ago” and click on “Copy to all.” Last, change the format by selecting “Graph type: Bar.”

Suggested by Diego Mendez-Carbajo.

View on FRED, series used in this post: CES6561000001, CES6562000101, CES6562400001


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