U.S. June Jobless Rate Falls 2 Percentage Points in Yale Survey

(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. labor market improved further in June as the jobless rate declined by almost two percentage points, according to a new survey -- funded by Yale University and led by a Nobel laureate -- that aims to be more timely and accurate than the official government data.

The Yale Labor Survey, released Thursday, estimated the U.S. unemployment rate at 15.3% in June for Americans age 20 and older, following 17.2% in May. The poll’s findings from April and May were in line with the surprise improvement in last month’s official Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, once adjusted for data-collection errors the agency has faced throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

The report provides a potential preview of next week’s official June jobs report, which is forecast to show the unemployment rate fell to 12.3% from 13.3%, a figure that’s not adjusted for mistakes where survey-takers misclassified respondents as employed. Data out earlier Thursday showed filings for unemployment claims were higher than forecast last week, indicating the recovery is cooling amid a pickup in coronavirus cases.

William Nordhaus, a Yale economist and Nobel Prize winner, led the team of researchers, which included Federal Reserve Bank of Boston economist Christopher Foote and Douglas Rivers, chief scientist at YouGov, the public opinion company that conducted the survey. The study was funded by Yale and the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.

The Yale survey reflects 35,000 online interviews from mid-March through mid-June. The government’s Current Population Survey, or CPS -- which determines the unemployment rate and is commonly known as the household survey -- covers about 60,000 eligible households.

The researchers said the questions in the government’s household survey weren’t written with the pandemic in mind, leading to people being misclassified as employed in the official figures.

“We basically had to walk a tightrope between writing questions that were conceptually similar to those in the CPS but that were flexible enough to really reflect the unique nature of the pandemic,” Foote said during a virtual press conference.

The BLS said earlier this month that the May rate, adjusted for the data errors, would have been 16.4%. The Yale survey’s estimate of 17.2% is based on a more expansive definition of who might be classified as unemployed, leading to rates that “are likely to be a few tenths of a percentage point higher than BLS’s calculations,” according to the report.

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