New Home Sales Crush Forecasts in Surge to 14-Year High

I usually look you to answer MY questions….but I’ll bite on this.

1. What is an economic time series?

An economic time series is a sequence of successive measurements of an economic activity (that is, variable) obtained at regular time intervals (such as every month or every quarter). The data must be comparable over time, so they must be consistent in the concept being measured and the way that concept is measured.

1. What is seasonal adjustment?

Seasonal adjustment is the process of estimating and removing seasonal effects from a time series in order to better reveal certain non-seasonal features. Examples of seasonal effects include a July drop in automobile production as factories retool for new models and increases in heating oil production during September in anticipation of the winter heating season.(Seasonal effects are defined more precisely in 5. and 6. below.) Sometimes we also estimate and remove trading day effects and moving holiday effects (see 7. below) during the seasonal adjustment process.

1. Why do you seasonally adjust data?

Seasonal movements are often large enough that they mask other characteristics of the data that are of interest to analysts of current economic trends. For example, if each month has a different seasonal tendency toward high or low values it can be difficult to detect the general direction of a time series’ recent monthly movement (increase, decrease, turning point, no change, consistency with another economic indicator, etc.). Seasonal adjustment produces data in which the values of neighboring months are usually easier to compare. Many data users prefer seasonally adjusted data because they want to see those characteristics that seasonal movements tend to mask, especially changes in the direction of the series.

1. In the original (unadjusted) series, this year’s April value is larger than the March value. But the seasonally adjusted series shows a decrease from March to April this year. What does this discrepancy mean?

This difference in direction can happen only when the seasonal factor for April is larger than the seasonal factor for March, indicating that when the underlying level of the series isn’t changing, the April value will typically be larger than the March value. This year, the original series’ April increase over the March value must be smaller than usual, either because the underlying level of the series is decreasing or because some special event or events abnormally increased the March value somewhat, or decreased the April value somewhat. (When trading day or moving holiday effects are present and are being adjusted out, other explanations are possible.)

1. What kinds of seasonal effects are removed during seasonal adjustment?

Seasonal adjustment procedures for monthly time series estimate effects that occur in the same calendar month with similar magnitude and direction from year to year. In series whose seasonal effects come primarily from weather (rather than from, say, Christmas sales or economic activity tied to the school year or the travel season), the seasonal factors are estimates of average weather effects for each month, for example, the average January decrease in new home construction in the Northeastern region of the U.S. due to cold and storms. Seasonal adjustment does not account for abnormal weather conditions or for year-to-year changes in weather. It is important to note that seasonal factors are estimates based on present and past experience and that future data may show a different pattern of seasonal factors.