MNI BRIEF: Fed Model Sees April Jobs Slowdown Risk

U.S. employers added between 618,000 and 1.3 million jobs in April, according to a St. Louis Fed model using high frequency data from scheduling software companies Kronos and Homebase. That falls short of the 843,000 to 1.67 million range forecast by the regional Fed bank's model last month. Actual payroll employment rose by 916,000 in March, according to the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Data from Kronos, which reflects the lower end of the forecast, has been "relatively flat" over the past few weeks, likely influenced by spring break in some parts of the country, St. Louis Fed economist Max Dvorkin told MNI in an email. The data saw a "positive jump" last week, he said, though that's outside of the BLS' survey week and won't be visible in official statistics.

Dvorkin cautioned that the Homebase data, used to calculate the forecast's upper end, "overpredicted the effective change in employment," last month by a larger margin than the Kronos data. Still, Dvorkin's coincident indices have forecast official jobs numbers from the BLS reasonably well through the pandemic.