1. How is Employment defined in IMPLAN?
Employment data in IMPLAN follows the same definition as Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Economic Accounts (BEA REA) and Bureau of Labor Statistics Census of Employment and Wages (BLS CEW) data, which is full-time/part-time annual average. Thus, 1 job lasting 12 months = 2 jobs lasting 6 months each = 3 jobs lasting 4 months each. A job can be either full-time or part-time. Similarly, a job that lasts one quarter of the year would be 1/4 (0.25) jobs. Note that a person can hold more than one job, so the job count is not necessarily the same as the count of employed persons.
Thus, while IMPLAN employment adjusts for seasonality, it does not indicate the number of hours worked per day. Thus, if you are using a full-time equivalent (FTE) value to add into IMPLAN results or as the proxy for an Event you will want to convert the FTE value to IMPLAN jobs prior to using it with IMPLAN. Conversely, if you need to report FTEs you will want to convert the IMPLAN jobs to reflect those. FTE and wage and salary to Employment Compensation conversions can be found in here. Whichever way you are converting, please keep in mind that FTE jobs are always fewer in number than the equivalent Part-time/Full time jobs.
The BEA calculates the number of FTE employees in each industry as follows:
FTE employees =
(total number of employees) * [(average weekly hours per employee for all
employees) / (average weekly hours per employee on full-time schedules)]
As for their determination on the number of hours for defining "employees on full-time schedules," the BEA uses BLS as a source and adopts their definition of full-time which is accounted for as anyone working 35 hours or more.
The Output per worker relationships are based on the average annual job. So if a worker works 6 months, they have half the annual Output and that worker will need to be entered as 0.5 jobs. To adjust the seasonal employment, take the job count times the number of months worked divided by 12. In equation form:
IMPLAN Jobs = Seasonal Jobs * [(months of seasonal job)/12]
Seasonal Jobs = IMPLAN Jobs / [(months of seasonal job)/12]
Keep in mind:
- If an industry is dominated by part-time workers this will be reflected in the earnings per worker.
- Employment itself is merely descriptive in the sense that it does not drive the Indirect or Indirect Effects.
- The Total Employment figure reported by IMPLAN represents full and part-time annual average including the self-employed, all federal, state, and local government employment and military employment (including overseas military).
2. Why does the Employment count in IMPLAN differ from what is reported in other data sources?
IMPLAN jobs include workers that are not accounted for by a number of other data sources. This often means that IMPLAN jobs are larger than many other sources report.
Learn more from our Knowledge Base:
Employment and Labor Income Data Sources
Special Industries in IMPLAN: Farm, Construction, Railroad, and Government
Accounting for Non-Disclosures, Exclusions, and Undercoverage in Employment Data
What if your reported Employment value is actually smaller than the reported value from another data source? This can happen because of BEA's rules for redefinitions. Following these rules we redefine some reported Employment, income and production to other Industries.
3. What are the differences between Employment Multipliers and Employment Effects?
All Multiplier derivations are based off of Output. Knowing regional total Output and regional total Employment. Using Output per Worker relationships, we can estimate the number of employees needed per million dollars of Output.
For Employment Multipliers, Direct, Indirect, and Induced multipliers are actual jobs per $1M of production.
The resulting Type I and Type SAM Multipliers are derived as follows:
Type 1: (Direct Employment + Indirect Employment) / Direct Employment
Type SAM: (Direct Employment + Indirect Employment+ Induced Employment)
/ Direct Employment
4. How does IMPLAN verify the total number of jobs created for modeled Events?
It is important to remember that IMPLAN jobs are not FTEs. Instead, IMPLAN follows the BEA job definitions, which include full-time, part-time, and seasonal jobs. Additionally, verification of the Direct Effect should be relatively easy based on the economic change defined. Generally speaking, we feel that, unless there are large numbers of jobs reported in the Indirect and Induced Effects, that these impacts are largely supported rather than created. This can be demonstrated by looking in the details of your impact results and also by comparing the jobs associated to the impact to the current Employment in the impacted Industries. Unless the change of Employment in the Indirect and Induced Effects are significant in comparison to the current Employment in the Sector, we recommend considering it supported rather than created. In addition, many attempts have been made over the years to verify Indirect and Induced jobs, and this has proved very difficult to actually discern.
5. The jobs associated to my short-term impact analysis seem too small. What went wrong?
IMPLAN is an annual model; therefore IMPLAN assumes that the value being entered as Output represents production over a year's time. Therefore, the Employment estimates provided by IMPLAN represent annualized Employment values. When you shrink the quantity of production into a smaller time frame more jobs will be necessitated for the same level of production to occur. Unfortunately there is no best way to adjust for this, and the analyst must use their personal knowledge of the region and Event to account for the changes they want to make to the Employment count. There is no preferred method because IMPLAN has a fixed Output per Worker ratio and therefore cannot adjust for the possibility that a single worker may be able to do more if there is sufficient demand for them to do so. It also cannot account for temporary shifts in workforce resulting from short-term events such as the movement of a part-time job to a full-time job for the period of increased production/demand.
6. How should jobs associated to multi-year construction impacts be reported?
We recommend that you divide the impact over the number of years of the project and report the average annual Employment. Visit the article Construction: Building Across Years for more details.
7. If I have an operational impact that occurs year-over-year are the job impacts summative?
Job impacts in year over year operational impacts should not be summed. Consider this scenario:
Blooms Garden Center opens in 2016 and creates 50 jobs. In 2017, there operations also support 50 jobs, but this does not mean that Blooms Garden Center supports 100 jobs. Instead it means that they support 50 annual jobs. Note also that the jobs are only called created in the first year.
What if the company has incremental employment increases planned?
If Blooms Garden Center purposes that they will expand to add 20 jobs in 2018 then:
- You could look at the impact of their adding 20 jobs in 2018 and the additional sales associated to that.
- You could look at the effect of 70 jobs at Blooms Garden Center in 2018.
- The new year-over-year impact would be 70 supported jobs.
8. Why do the Government Employment & Payroll Sectors start with an *?
These are specialty Industries that represent just government payroll and Value Added. As such, these Industries have no Intermediate Expenditures associated to them and will generate no Indirect Effects. If you are looking to Model the effects of government spending in your region, we recommend you use the appropriate Institutional Spending Pattern Event Type.
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How Employment is Defined in IMPLAN
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Updated December 15, 2021