also have been about 1 / 4 percentage point higher as well, implying that measurement issues of this sort likely account for only part of the productivity slowdown in current statistics. research in this area is at an early stage, but this example illustrates the depth of analysis supporting our data - dependent decisionmaking. how tight is the labor market? let me now turn from the measurement issues raised by the information age to an issue that has long been at the center of monetary policymaking : how tight is the labor market? answering this question is central to our outlook for both of our dual - mandate goals of maximum employment and price stability. while this topic is always front and in the case of facebook, brynjolfsson, collis, and eggers ( 2019 ) found that the median user required compensation of $ 48 to live without that social media platform for a month. byrne and corrado ( 2019 ). - 8center in our thinking, i am raising it today to illustrate how we are using big data to inform policymaking. until recently, the official data showed job gains over the year through march 2019 of about 210, 000 a month, which is far higher than necessary to absorb new entrants into the labor force and thus hold the unemployment rate constant. in august, the bls publicly previewed the benchmark data revision coming in february 2020, and the news was that job gains over this period were more like 170, 000 per month — a meaningfully lower number that itself remains subject to revision. the pace of job gains is hard to pin down in real time largely because of the dynamism of our economy : many new businesses open and others close every month, creating some jobs and ending others, and definitive data on this turnover arrive with a substantial lag. thus, initial data are, in part, sophisticated guesses based on what is known as the birth – death model of firms. several years ago, we began a collaboration with the payroll processing firm adp to construct a measure of payroll employment from their data set, which covers about 20 percent of the nation ’ s private workforce and is available to us with a roughly oneweek delay. 15 as described in a recent research paper, we constructed a measure that provides an independent read on payroll employment that complements the official statistics. 16 while experience is still limited with the new measure, we find promising evidence that it can refine our real - time picture of job gains. for example, in the first eight months

of 2008, as the great recession was getting underway, the official monthly employment data showed total job losses of about 750, 000 ( figure 4 ). a later benchmark this share is comparable to that covered in the sample used by the bls, but the bls sample is designed to be representative, while the adp sample is simply their customer base. cajner and others ( 2019 ). - 9revision told a much bleaker story, with declines of about 1. 5 million. our new measure, had it been available in 2008, would have been much closer to the revised data, alerting us that the job situation might be considerably worse than the official data suggested. 17 we believe that the new measure may help us better understand job market conditions in real time. the preview of the bls benchmark revision leaves average job gains over the year through march solidly above the pace required to accommodate growth in the workforce over that time, but where we had seen a booming job market, we now see more - moderate growth. the benchmark revision will not directly affect data for job gains since march, but experience with past revisions suggests that some part of the benchmark will likely carry forward. thus, the currently reported job gains of 157, 000 per month on average over the past three months may well be revised somewhat lower. based on a range of data and analysis, including our new measure, we now judge that, even allowing for such a revision, job gains remain above the level required to provide jobs for new entrants to the jobs market over time. of course, the pace of job gains is only one of many job market issues that figure into our assessment of how the economy is performing relative to our maximum - employment mandate and our assessment of any inflationary pressures arising in the job market. what does data dependence mean at present? in summary, data dependence is, and always has been, at the heart of policymaking at the federal reserve. we are always seeking out new and better sources any example about the details of data deserves detailed comment. our adp - based estimate showed job losses of about 1 million over this period, considerably more than the real - time bls data but well short of the post - benchmark value. this episode motivated the bls to revise their procedures in ways that will reduce the revisions in similar episodes in the future. see bls ( 2019 ) for a technical note last updated in august and bls ( 2010 )