An examination of Okun's Law in the U.S., which focuses on potential breaks in the law at the national level and a panel analysis of the states.

This thesis aims to study the macroeconomic performance of China. China has been experiencing rapid economic growth and it has been changing gradually from a planned to a market economy since it initiated the well known “open door policy” combined with a “coastal development strategy” in 1978. However, rapid growth has occurred on the background of increasing regional disparity. Meanwhile, unemployment has increased significantly during last two decades, and has become one of the most pressing problems of the Chinese economy today. Moreover, another major challenge facing the Chinese economy is how to deal with various shocks, and to ensure the sustainability and balance of economic growth in the face of the increasing economic uncertainties associated with its deep reform and integration into the world trade and financial system. Based on the above concerns and literature review, this study, firstly, uses an augmented Solow-Swan model of Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992) to assess the role FDI plays in underlying regional differences in economic growth across Chinese provinces over the reform period 1978-2008. My analysis indicates that the augmented Solow growth model appears to provide a good description of regional growth patterns in China over the period 1978-2008 and the data display conditional convergence. After controlling for FDI and other determinants of growth, provinces that were initially poor tend to grow faster and the evidence in favour of conditional convergence becomes even stronger after splitting the data into subsamples. I then focus on the study of the relationship between unemployment and growth at both national level and regional level in order to find out how unemployment affects China’s economic growth and economic reform progress overall. I find that Okun’s relationship does not hold in China universally and, furthermore, the nature of the observed relationship has changed during the transition progress. I argue that there are hump shaped relationships both between growth and unemployment and between the speed of transition and unemployment in China. The results are consistent with several theoretical and empirical studies in the literature. Finally, structural VAR methodology pioneered by Bayoumi and Eichengreen (1993) is used to identify and decompose supply and demand shocks to two variables, (the log of) output (annual real GDP) and (the log of) prices (annual GDP deflator). I then compute and discuss the correlation of such shocks across provinces and show how it has evolved over the four main sub-periods of China’s history. Moreover, I investigate which factors contribute to economic integration or divergence in the Chinese economy.

Okun's Law postulates an inverse relationship between movements of the unemployment rate and the real gross domestic product (GDP). In this article we investigate Okun's law for 15 OECD countries and check for its structural stability. By using data on employment and the labor force we infer whether structural instability is caused either from the the demand side or the supply side. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers Series "Growth and Employment in Europe: Sustainability and Competitiveness"

Okun's Law postulates an inverse relationship between movements of the unemployment rate and the real gross domestic product (GDP). Empirical estimates for US data indicate that a two to three percent GDP growth rate above the natural or average GDP growth rate causes unemployment to decrease by one percentage point and vice versa. In this investigation we check whether this postulated relationship exhibits structural breaks by means of Markov-Chain Monte Carlo methods. We estimate a regression model, where the parameters are allowed to switch between different states and the switching process is Markov. As a by-product we derive an estimate of the current state within the periods considered. Using quarterly Austrian data on unemployment and real GDP from 1977 to 1995 we infer only one state, i.e. there are no structural breaks. The estimated parameters demand for an excess GDP growth rate of 4.16% to decrease unemployment by one percentage point. Since only one state is inferred, we conclude that the Austrian economy exhibits a stable relationship between unemployment and GDP growth. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers SFB "Adaptive Information Systems and Modelling in Economics and Management Science"

Yes / The misery index (the unweighted sum of unemployment and inflation rates) was probably the first attempt to develop a single statistic to measure the level of a population’s economic malaise. In this letter, we develop a dynamic approach to decompose the misery index using two basic relations of modern macroeconomics: the expectations-augmented Phillips curve and Okun’s law. Our reformulation of the misery index is closer in spirit to Okun’s idea. However, we are able to offer an improved version of the index, mainly based on output and unemployment. Specifically, this new Okun’s index measures the level of economic discomfort as a function of three key factors: (1) the misery index in the previous period; (2) the output gap in growth rate terms; and (3) cyclical unemployment. This dynamic approach differs substantially from the standard one utilised to develop the misery index, and allow us to obtain an index with five main interesting features: (1) it focuses on output, unemployment and inflation; (2) it considers only objective variables; (3) it allows a distinction between short-run and long-run phenomena; (4) it places more importance on output and unemployment rather than inflation; and (5) it weights recessions more than expansions.

The submitted diploma thesis is dedicated to the calculation of the estimation of output gap by three estimating techniques (Hodrick-Prescott filter, Kalman filtering, and Cobb-Douglas production function) for the Czech Republic during the years 1995-2009, and, consequently, to their usefulness for testing the Okun's law as a suitable predicative tool. In other words, which of the mentioned methods is the most appropriate one for an accurate prediction of the rate of unemployment. To achieve this, the Box-Jenkins methodology is used for modelling and designing the cyclical unemployment forecasts and dynamic version of the Okun's law. The results indicate that, for the given period, there is relatively strong and unstable relationship between changes in output gap and changes in cyclical unemployment in the Czech Republic. The most suitable technique for the estimating of the future development of unemployment gap seems to be the Cobb-Douglas production function approach. This is namely based on the quantity of gained forecast errors and Granger causality.

In this thesis we examined the validity of Okun’s law across four Nordic countries (Sweden,Norway, Finland and Denmark) using the gap version of Okun's law. Our method foranalyzing the Okun’s law for Nordic countries in this study is time series. We performed anAugmented-Dickey fuller test in order to test for stationarity, to which the result yielded allvariables stationary. Our result, after running the regression of the gap version of Okun’s law,confirms the existence of a negative relationship between unemployment rate and economicgrowth. However, the outcome indicates different Okun coefficients for the four Nordiccountries within the time period of 1989-2018. In conclusion we can affirm that according toour result, the basic assumptions made by Okun regarding a negative correlation betweenunemployment rate and output still holds true today for Nordic countries, with the exceptionthat the percentage decrease in unemployment rate when output increases by one percentvaries across Nordic countries. / I denna uppsats undersökte vi validiteten av Okuns lag för fyra nordiska länder (Sverige, Norge, Finland och Danmark) hjälp av Okuns lag gap modellen. Vår metod för att analyseraOkuns lag för de nordiska länderna i denna studie är tidsserier. Vi testade stationariteten ivåra resultat från tidsserie regressionen via ett Augmented-Dickey fuller test, vilketindikerade att alla variabler var stationära. Vårt resultat, efter att ha utfört regressionen av gapversionen av Okuns lag, bekräftar förekomsten av ett negativt samband mellan arbetslöshetoch ekonomisk tillväxt. Utfallet indikerar dock olika Okun-koefficienter för de fyra nordiskaländerna inom tidsperioden 1989-2018. Sammanfattningsvis kan vi konstatera att enligt vårtresultat gäller de fundamentala antagandena för Okuns lag fortfarande idag för de nordiskaländerna, med undantaget att den procentuella minskningen av arbetslösheten närproduktionen ökar med en procent varierar mellan de nordiska länderna.

The thesis investigates the behavior of Spain’s persistently high unemployment rate. Rigid labor laws, unemployment insurance generosity, and the demographics of the unemployed are part of the cause, but they are only underlying factors driving the hysteresis that has been present for nearly four decades. The thesis attempts to extract explanations for this persistence by comparing Spain to other countries, such as its next-door neighbor, Portugal. Special attention is placed on the role that recessions and subsequent changes in real GDP growth play in sustaining a high rate of unemployment.

Cette thèse met en évidence l'aspect asymétrique de l'élasticité du chômage par rapport à la production aux Etats-Unis et en Europe. Une première partie de ce travail empirique revient sur une estimation de la valeur ``authentique'' du coefficient d'Okun corrigé du biais de publication. Nous employons une méta-analyse et nous montrons qu'un aspect important de déformation du coefficient réside dans le choix de la variable endogène. Dans le second chapitre, nous montrons que loi d'Okun implique dans ses fondements un comportement procyclique de la productivité générée par la pratique de la rétention de main d’œuvre. L'économie américaine présente une déformation significative du coefficient d’Okun au cours des récessions et reprises depuis le milieu des années 80, quand la productivité a perdu son caractère procyclique. En Allemagne et en France, à l’inverse, le coefficient d'Okun se déforme peu au cours du cycle. Cette spécificité européenne pourrait venir de la nature des fluctuations macroéconomiques. Ainsi, l'économie allemande enregistre des chocs macroéconomiques avec un fort caractère transitoire et persistant. Néanmoins, le reste des pays européens présentent des chocs de nature permanente. Dans le dernier chapitre, nous montrons que le PIB réel et le chômage peuvent partager une relation de cointégration asymétrique qui semble être associée à une courbe de Phillips asymétrique. / This dissertation aims at study asymmetry of elasticity of unemployment to output in United States and Europe. In the first chapter, we employ a meta-analysis to identify the ``authentic'' value of Okun's law coefficient beyond publication bias. We show that measure of Okun's coefficient depends about the choice of endogenous variable. In the second chapter, it appears that Okun's law implies a labor productivity procyclical as firm practices labor hoarding. According our estimates, Okun's law presents significative evidence of asymmetry during recessions and recoveries especially since the mid-1980s when positive correlation between real GDP and productivity has disappeared. Conversely, in France and Germany, we observe a more stable Okun's coefficient along business cycle. The nature of macroeconomic movements in Europe could potentially explain these findings. Germany supports transitory and persistent movements in real GDP and unemployment. Nevertheless, macroeconomic movements in other European countries are driven by permanents shocks. In last chapter, we investigate asymmetric cointregration in a sample of European countries (France, Germany and United Kingdom), we show that asymmetric cointegration between real GDP and unemployment seems to be linked to an asymmetric Phillip's curve.

This thesis analyses Okun's law and its cross-country differences based on social expenditures. To estimate the law in time, Nadaraya-Watson kernel estimation is employed, which has not been applied to Okun's law in any previous study. Thus, to assess the robustness of the model, the statistical testing of hypotheses is used to evaluate the time-varying coefficients. The analysis is executed on OECD countries between 1995 and 2019, and the results are mainly in line with the previous literature. Periods with higher GDP growth and lower unemployment rates, on average, tend to have higher Okun's coefficients. Moreover, cross-country comparison reports the tendency of countries with, on average lower unemployment spending and higher GDP per capita to exhibit higher Okun's coefficients.