State Labor Markets in October 2023
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State labor markets were soft in October. Florida’s 28,400 increase (.3 percent) was the only statistically significant change in payrolls (California’s 40,200 gain was not seen as statistically significant). The number of states reporting point declines was comparable to the number reporting increases. The sum of the states’ payroll changes was only 43,800 (noticeably smaller than the national 150,000), the lowest such figure since December 2020.
26 states had statistically significant increases in their unemployment rates in October, though none were larger than .2 percentage point. Nevada continued to have the nation’s highest rate, at 5.4 percent while DC was at 5.0 percent. No other state had a rate more than 1 percentage point above the nation’s 3.9 percent, though California, Illinois, and New Jersey were higher than 4.5 percent. Alabama, Florida, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming, all had rates at or below 2.9 percent, with Maryland at 1.7 percent.
Puerto Rico’s unemployment rate fell t0 5.8 percent, and the island’s payrolls increased 2,800.
Charles Steindel
AuthorMore in Author Profile »Charles Steindel has been editor of Business Economics, the journal of the National Association for Business Economics, since 2016. From 2014 to 2021 he was Resident Scholar at the Anisfield School of Business, Ramapo College of New Jersey. From 2010 to 2014 he was the first Chief Economist of the New Jersey Department of the Treasury, with responsibilities for economic and revenue projections and analysis of state economic policy. He came to the Treasury after a long career at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he played a major role in forecasting and policy advice and rose to the rank of Senior Vice-President. He has served in leadership positions in a number of professional organizations. In 2011 he received the William F. Butler Award from the New York Association for Business Economics, is a fellow of NABE and of the Money Marketeers of New York University, and has received several awards for articles published in Business Economics. In 2017 he delivered Ramapo College's Sebastian J. Raciti Memorial Lecture. He is a member of the panel for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's Survey of Professional Forecasters and of the Committee on Research in Income and Wealth. He has published papers in a range of areas, and is the author of Economic Indicators for Professionals: Putting the Statistics into Perspective. He received his bachelor's degree from Emory University, his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a National Association for Business Economics Certified Business EconomistTM.
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