 Okun's Law RevisitedOxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 2003, vol. 65, issue 4, 439-451 Abstract: In the light of modern theoretical studies, the negative relationship between output and unemployment may take a nonlinear form, in the sense that changes in output can cause asymmetric changes in the unemployment rate. A regime‐dependent specification of Okun's law, where the inverse relationship between cyclical unemployment and cyclical GDP is allowed to differ across recessions and expansions, is estimated for the US economy. Using both the Hodrick–Prescott filter and a bivariate structural time series model to isolate the cyclical component of the variables of interest, the nonlinear specification is highly significant when tested against the linear alternative independently of the method used for extracting the cycle of unemployment and GDP. The estimation results imply that the contemporaneous effect of growth on unemployment is asymmetric and significantly higher in recessions than in expansions, and shocks to unemployment tend to be more persistent in the expansionary regime. Date: 2003 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:obuest:v:65:y:2003:i:4:p:439-451 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Christopher Adam, Anindya Banerjee, Christopher Bowdler, David Hendry, Adriaan Kalwij, John Knight and Jonathan Temple More articles in Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics from Department of Economics, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC. |
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