Economix: More Jobs Than We Knew

The government's estimates of job creation are not particularly accurate, a point that is often made and often ignored. On Thursday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statisticsprovided another reminder. The agency said it probably undercounted the extent of job creation between April 2011 and March 2012 by 20 percent.

The agency, which issues a much-discussed monthly estimate, also issues regular revisions of those estimates, which regularly receive much less attention. One of the most important revisions uses state unemployment insurance tax records – records filed by nearly all employers, which include actual counts of the numbers of people they employ — to check the accuracy of a full year of its monthly estimates.

In that revision, published Thursday, the agency concluded that an additional 386,000 jobs were created during the 12-month period, a 20 percent jump over its previous estimate that employment increased by about 1.94 million jobs. The revision is preliminary; a final version will not be published until February.

The new numbers would increase the monthly pace of job creation during that period to about 194,000 a month, up from a pace of 162,000 jobs a month.

The agency still estimates that job growth has since slowed to a pace of 87,000 jobs a month over the last five months. Those data won't be revised until next September.