The dismal decade of 2010-19 recorded the slowest productivity growth of any decade in U.S. history, only 1.1 percent per year in the business sector. Yet the pandemic appears to have created a resurgence in productivity growth with a 4.1 percent rate achieved in the four quarters of 2020. This...

By far the most widely noted and puzzling aspect of the current economic recovery is its failure to create jobs. While payroll employment in seven previous recessions increased a full 7 percent in the first twenty-three months following the NBER business cycle trough, such employment increased...

The evolution of unemployment in West Germany and the U. S. stands in sharp contrast, with German unemployment much lower from 1960 to the early 1970s but substantially higher from 1984 to 1988. This paper provides a framework for examining the relationship between inflation and unemployment...