The Week Ahead

Auto sales

Low gas prices are giving Americans more confidence to buy a car. Auto sales jumped 11 percent in December from a year earlier. Did the trend continue into this month? A forecast from J.D. Power and LMC Automotive calls for January sales to reach a seasonally adjusted annual pace of 16.4 million units, up from 15.2 million a year ago. Sales come out Tuesday.

Unappetizing results?

Wall Street predicts that Yum Brands’ fourth-quarter earnings declined from a year earlier.

The company, which owns the Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and KFC chains, has struggled with the fallout of a TV report in China last summer that showed one of its suppliers using expired meat. In October, Yum cut its profit outlook for the year after sales at KFC locations in China slumped in the third quarter. The company’s latest results are due out Wednesday.

Eye on hiring

The Labor Department reports its data on jobs Friday.

Economists anticipate that nonfarm employers added 228,000 jobs in January. That would be down from 252,000 in December and the second monthly decline in a row. The U.S. economy added nearly 3 million jobs in 2014. That helped bring down the nation’s unemployment rate to 5.6 percent in December, the lowest it’s been since 2008.