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Download CES Monthly Jobs Revisions

Source: R/getCESRevisions.R
getCESRevisions.Rd

Scrapes the Bureau of Labor Statistics table of monthly Current Employment Statistics (CES) revisions from https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm and returns a tidy tibble of first, second, and third prints of the over-the-month change in total nonfarm employment (1979-present), seasonally adjusted and not seasonally adjusted, along with the revision deltas between prints.

Usage

getCESRevisions(
  source_url = "https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm",
  timeout = 60
)

Arguments

source_url

Character string with the BLS revisions page URL. Defaults to the CES NAICS revisions page; override only if BLS moves the page.

timeout

Numeric. Maximum seconds to wait for the page to load in headless Chrome before failing. Default 60.

Value

A tibble with one row per month and columns:

date

Observation month (first of month).

year

Calendar year (integer).

month

Three-letter month abbreviation.

month_num

Month number 1-12 (integer).

sa_1st, sa_2nd, sa_3rd

Seasonally adjusted first, second, and third prints of the over-the-month employment change (thousands).

sa_rev_2nd_minus_1st, sa_rev_3rd_minus_2nd, sa_rev_3rd_minus_1st

Seasonally adjusted revisions between prints (thousands).

nsa_1st, nsa_2nd, nsa_3rd

Not seasonally adjusted prints (thousands).

nsa_rev_2nd_minus_1st, nsa_rev_3rd_minus_2nd, nsa_rev_3rd_minus_1st

Not seasonally adjusted revisions (thousands).

source_url

URL the data was scraped from.

scraped_at

UTC timestamp of the download (vintage).

Details

The BLS revisions page sits behind Akamai bot detection that rejects requests from R's HTTP stack (httr/curl) based on their TLS fingerprint, regardless of the User-Agent header. This function therefore fetches the page through a headless Chrome browser via the chromote package, which requires a local installation of Google Chrome (or another Chromium-based browser). Both chromote and rvest must be installed to use this function.

Each calendar year on the page is published as its own table with a three-row header (adjustment status, measure, print). Tables are parsed with rvest::html_table(), headers are flattened, and target columns are located by pattern so that reordering or added columns on the BLS page do not silently misalign values. If the same year-month appears in more than one table, the most complete row is kept.

All values are over-the-month changes in thousands of jobs. Recent months will have NA second or third prints until those estimates are published; revision columns are NA until both prints exist.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
  revisions <- getCESRevisions()

  # Average absolute seasonally adjusted revision, first to third print:
  mean(abs(revisions$sa_rev_3rd_minus_1st), na.rm = TRUE)
} # }