Macroeconomics Commons^™

The Changing Dynamics Of The Employment Gap And Its Macroeconomic Implications, William Brian Gowen

Honors Projects in Economics

There has been much discussion about the sluggish economic recovery out of the recent recession. However, the lag in employment growth is not unique to the most recent recovery. Jobless recoveries have plagued the U.S. economy over the last three business cycles. The reasons for this change have remained largely inconclusive, with several factors highlighted in the current literature. This paper uses Vector Autoregression (VAR) to analyze the employment gap in the United States over the past six decades. Unlike previous studies, it accounts for the most recent recession while also addressing alternative explanations - trade and globalization, government employment, …