On Friday, Wall Street traders were anxiously awaiting the federal government's release
of numbers on the January increase in nonfarm payrolls. The early consensus estimate
among economists was for a growth of 250,000 new jobs (CNBC, February 3, 2006).
However, a sample of 20 economists taken Thursday afternoon provided a sample mean
of 266,000 with a sample standard deviation of 24,000. Financial analysts often call such
a sample mean, based on late-breaking news, the whisper number. Treat the "consensus
estimate" as the population mean. Conduct a hypothesis test to determine whether the
whisper number justifies a conclusion of a statistically significant increase in the consen-
sus estimate of economists. Use a = .01 as the level of significance.