including agriculture and the self employed. The point is that the two concepts are different. The following Table is taken from the BLS's April 2012 release. The adjusted series is referred to as a "research series" by the BLS and attempts to bring the two concepts of employment closer together. They adjust the household survey by "subtracting agriculture and related employment, nonagricultural self employed, unpaid family workers, private household workers, and workers absent without pay from their jobs, and then adding nonagricultural wage and salary multiple jobholders". The "household survey has a broader employment definition than the payroll survey" and so the former is always higher than the latter. They move in a similar cyclical pattern though with very similar turning points (troughs and peaks). To begin, I have been examining the way in which employment growth in the US responds to real GDP growth. We might think of this in terms of employment intensity -- the percentage response of employment growth to a one per cent change in real GDP growth. 1. What is the sensitivity of employment growth over the whole sample? 2. Was that sensitivity different over the peak to recovery periods for the last four recessions? 3. At what rate of real GDP growth does employment growth turn from trough to recovery? In a further blog (next week maybe depending on my progress), I will put those questions into further context when I introduce a full decomposition framework for analysing the sources of the employment growth