1. Homebase
Discovered Homebase data. Homebase provides a scheduling and time tracking tool, and they've made a dataset publicly available that comprises 60,000 US businesses and 1 million hourly employees. It's the most impressive high frequency economic dataset I've seen, and the numbers are jarring. Relative to median hours for a given weekday during Jan. 4 - Jan. 31, 2020, 66 percent fewer local businesses are open and 75 percent fewer hourly employees are working as of April 12, 2020. The beauty and personal care industry has been the hardest hit, with only 4 percent of firms still open on April 12, followed by leisure and entertainment (84 percent). Groups such as the Rustandy Center at Chicago Booth have conducted some useful analyses with this data.
The chart below, provided by Homebase, shows a time series of hours worked by hourly employees through April 11:
Homebase's customers are primarily restaurant, food & beverage, retail and services businesses, largely individual owned / operator managed.
2. As the US consumer goes, so goes the economy
I've set up a two-question multiple choice survey to use as an input to an economic model. Essentially the survey asks (1) are you spending more or less this month than on average, and (2) will you spend more or less next month?
An explanation is provided in the survey. Feel free to take it!
The next two charts provide some additional context for why I'm setting up this survey.
One shows the components of GDP from 2017Q1 to 2019Q4 in a conventional way...
and the other shows the same data with the axes swapped...
It's a zany chart, but the point is that consumption is by far the biggest component of GDP. If you've got the best handle on where that's going, you've probably got the best GDP forecast.
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