The Unassuming Economist

From Slate:

You may have heard of the idea of a “jobless recovery,” a recovery in which the economy grows but doesn’t add jobs because of structural problems or because firms are adding robots instead or whatnot. Some hot new research from Laurence Ball, Daniel Leigh, and Prakash Loungani says the problem here is there’s no such thing as a jobless recovery and the classic Okun’s Law link between GDP growth and employment is holding up fine. If recent recoveries haven’t packed much job-creating punch it’s because the recoveries have been unusually slow in terms of GDP growth as well.

I liked that paper because I recently sat through the presentation of an economics paper showing that one leading explanation for jobless recoveries—a reversal of traditional “labor hoarding” behavior patterns—is wrong and based on bad data. It turns out, in other words, that counter-cyclical productivity doesn’t explain jobless recoveries both because productivity isn’t counter-cyclical and because there are no jobless recoveries.

Following the recent financial crisis and its subsequent Great Recession, the issue of a sluggish US employment was raised by economic observers. In a previous post on Econbrowser, Menzie Chinn pointed out the usefulness of the Okun’s law in assessing the potential level of employment after the recession. Especially, Menzie shows that:

See the interview here.

This paper investigates how well Okun’s Law explains short-run unemployment movements in the United States since 1948 and in a sample of 20 advanced economies since 1980. Our principal conclusion is that Okun’s Law is a strong and stable relationship in most countries. Also, the coefficient in the relationship—the effect of a one percent change in output on the unemployment rate—varies substantially across countries. We take a first look at the sources of these differences; one finding is that they are not explained by differences in employment protection laws. Finally, we find that Okun’s Law held up well during the Great Recession and that recoveries have not become “jobless” in the sense of a breakdown in Okun’s Law. The paper is available here.

United States: Actual and Fitted Unemployment Rate, 1948Q2-2011Q4

Sara Eisen of Bloomberg TV moderated a discussion on jobs and growth at the Tokyo annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank. IMF Deputy Managing Director Zhu said that “in the near term, a growth strategy is the best jobs strategy”. Read his views here.