Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Regularities: Cyclical and Structural Productivity in the United States (1950–2005)

Yongbok Jeon and Matías Vernengo
Additional contact information
Yongbok Jeon: Industrial Strategy Division, Hyundai Research Institute, Hyundai Building 11th Floor 140-2 Gye-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea, ybjeon@hri.co.kr

Review of Radical Political Economics, 2008, vol. 40, issue 3, 237-243

Abstract: Changes in labor productivity have been a source of puzzlement and paradoxical results for economists. We suggest that puzzles and paradoxes vanish once two simple regularities are properly acknowledged. Okun's and Verdoorn's laws explain 87 percent of all the variations in labor productivity. Also, our estimation method and our results suggest that conventional measures of Okun's Law have overestimated the value of the Okun coefficient, and accepted a greater degree of variability than is actually guaranteed by the empirical evidence. Okun's Law has been relatively stable through time, and there has been no significant decrease in the value of the parameter since the 1960s.

Keywords: productivity; cycle; structural change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://rrp.sagepub.com/content/40/3/237.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:reorpe:v:40:y:2008:i:3:p:237-243

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Radical Political Economics from Union for Radical Political Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().