Labor resilience
The largest rise in a county's monthly unemployment rate from a low point to a later high across its published record.
How far a county's unemployment rate has climbed, at worst, from a low point to a later high within its published monthly record.
The unemployment rate on its own describes where a labor market stands now. It says nothing about how that labor market behaves when conditions turn. Two counties can sit at the same rate today having arrived there very differently: one drifting within a narrow band for a decade, the other spiking several points during a downturn and recovering. This measure separates them.
It reads the same official monthly series as the unemployment rate — Local Area Unemployment Statistics estimates for counties, defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as "the unemployed percent of the civilian labor force" (LAUS Questions and Answers) — and reports the worst deterioration it contains rather than its current level.
Metrics in this family#
Largest unemployment run-up
stabilityThe largest increase in the county's monthly unemployment rate from any prior trough to a subsequent peak, measured across the full span of published months and reported in percentage points.
The measure is not tied to a fixed window. It answers what the county's published record actually contains, so its meaning depends on which episodes that record spans.
Considerations#
The record covered runs monthly from January 2015 through the most recent release, and publication lags the reference month by roughly four to five weeks.
That span is short, and it contains the 2020 labor market shock. Where a county's largest run-up falls in 2020, the figure describes how hard that county was hit by a single national event rather than its behavior across a full business cycle. A county whose worst episode predates 2015 will show a smaller figure than its longer history would support, because the earlier episode is outside the record read here.
County estimates are not seasonally adjusted; the Bureau applies seasonal adjustment to states and a small number of large substate areas only (Seasonal Adjustment). Some of the month-to-month movement this measure reads is therefore seasonal rather than cyclical, and counties with strongly seasonal industries such as agriculture, construction, and tourism will register larger swings for that reason alone.
Estimates also revise. The Bureau reworks up to five years of previous data each January (LAUS Estimation Methodology), which can move both the trough and the peak that define this figure.
Birdseye displays census tracts, and no tract-level series exists. Each tract shows the value published for the county containing it. That is exact containment rather than an estimate, but every tract within a county shows the same figure. Coverage reaches 83,529 of the 85,395 tracts we carry.
References#
- 1LAUS Questions and Answershttps://www.bls.gov/lau/laufaq.htm
- 2Seasonal Adjustmenthttps://www.bls.gov/lau/lauseas.htm
- 3LAUS Estimation Methodologyhttps://www.bls.gov/lau/laumthd.htm