The US economy grew reasonably fast during the last quarter of 2010, and the general expectation is that satisfactory growth will continue in 2011-12. The expansion may, indeed, continue into 2013. But with large deficits in both the government and foreign sectors, satisfactory growth in the...

Existence of phenomena such as unemployment and low earnings of the poorest social strata in both periods of recession and the economic boom, highlights the existence of root causes in society. Providing answers to the question: what are the causes and the solutions can be implemented to solve...

Existence of phenomena such as unemployment and low earnings of the poorest social strata in both periods of recession and the economic boom, highlights the existence of root causes in society. Providing answers to the question: what are the causes and the solutions can be implemented to solve...

In most U.S. post-war business cycles, recessions were followed by above trend growth in output and employment. After the last three recessions, however, output and employment growth were sluggish. Economists focusing on employment have described these recoveries as “jobless.” This paper...

This paper examines the dynamic relationships that exist between output growth and unemployment and assesses the role of macroeconomic policies in shaping these relationships. Using Nigeria's data for the period 1970-2010, we first estimated the linear Okun-type model using the transitory and...

An assessment of the current state of housing viewed from the perspective of the slowly-recovering economy, coupled with valuations of the housing market, suggests there is a high likelihood of a double dip in housing prices. With current prices nearly 30 percent below their April 2006 peak, an...

We estimate Okun's law, the negative relationship between output and the unemployment rate, at the sector level for the US, the UK, Japan, and Switzerland to test several hypotheses that may explain why the aggregate Okun's coeffcients are different across countries. Specifically, we show that...

Structural vector-autoregressions with long-run restrictions are extraordinarily sensitive to low-frequency correlations. This paper explores this sensitivity analytically and via simulations, focusing on the contentious issue of whether hours worked rise or fall when technology improves. Recent...

How do labour market policies influence employment's responsiveness to output fluctuations (employment-output elasticity)? We revisit this question on a panel of OECD countries, which also incorporates the period of the Great Recession. We distinguish between passive and active labour market...

This paper studies the relationship between the change in the unemployment rate and output growth using an approach based on labor market flows. The framework shows why the Okun coefficient may be constant/time-varying and/or symmetric/asymmetric and that the outcome lies with the behavior of...