Last jobcoincident indices:
Figure 1: Wisconsin nonfarm payroll employment (dark blue), Philadelphia Fed’s first NFP benchmark measure (pink), civilian employment (beige), linearly interpolated real wages and salaries, deflated by national chain CPI (sky blue ), GDP (red), coincident index (green), everything in the logs 2021M11=0. Source: BLS, BEA, Philadelphia Fed (1), (2)and the author’s calculations.
While Thursday’s jobs release showed a slight m/m decline in nonfarm payrolls, the three-month change was 12,600 (or 1.7% annualized growth).
Note that the coincident index for Wisconsin continues to accelerate in February. The trajectory of the coincident index (along with other indicators) diverges from that of Wisconsin’s real GDP. It should be noted that GDP at the state level is not calculated directly as one would at the national level, via the expenditure approach. Rather, the estimate is based on factor payments, combined with national industrial data on value added (see BEA (2017)).
Real wages have increased since November 2021 (previous peak in US GDP). Since average wages do not take into account wage asymmetry, in the absence of a median wage (see COWS/High Road Strategy to discuss median wage growth in 2022), I add real wages for leisure and hospitality workers.
Figure 2: Average hourly wage for Wisconsin leisure and hospitality workers (blue) and all private sector workers (tan), in 2023 dollars, in 2021M11=0 logs. Wages deflated by the CPI for the Central-North-East sub-region, seasonally adjusted by the author using the X-13 census. Source: BLS and author’s calculations.
The BLS does not report inflation by state. For states in the BLS Midwest subregion including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, the cumulative change in price level is comparable to that of the United States as a whole.
Out-of-home food prices increased relatively more in the Midwest subregion, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Relative price of food products in the country compared to the overall CPI in the Central-Northeast sub-region (blue) and nationally (bronze), both in logs, 2021M11=0. East-North Central price indices seasonally adjusted by the author using the X-13 census. Source: BLS and author’s calculations.
As stated in a previous jobhome food prices (read approximately groceries) have increased proportionately more in the East-North Central sub-region than in the country as a whole.
