Seasonal Adjustment to Facilitate Forecasting Empirical Results Form

Instructions and help about Seasonal Adjustment To Facilitate Forecasting Empirical Results

*Background music* When you hear "seasonally adjusted" from the Bureau of  Labor Statistics, do you know what that means? Seasonal adjustment can help show what BLS numbers  say about real life. So much of our activity—what   we do, what we buy, where we go—is seasonal. We  vacation in the summer, we start school in the fall,   we plant gardens in spring, buy snow shovels when a  blizzard comes, and buy produce when it's in season.   All of this activity has an economic component  and affects the statistics BLS produces. This is  a chart of construction employment. For a number of  reasons, construction work decreases in the winter   and increases in the summer. From year to year, that  cycle of increase and decrease looks remarkably   similar, down to the small notch at the top of each  wave. But it's also valuable to compare data over   time. Seasonal adjustment is a mathematical method  used to remove seasonal fluctuations. A seasonally   adjusted graph