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Naked Capitalism:
Jobless recoveries: exploring technology's role

14 May 2017

Article by Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels. Article originally published at VoxEU, Saturday 13 May

Recoveries from recessions in the US used to involve rapid job generation. During the 1970s and 1980s, the first two years of recoveries saw an average increase in employment of over 5%. But since the 1990s, the job recovery engine has slowed down, and the first two years of recoveries have generated, on average, less than a 1% increase in employment (Gali et al. 2012). This recent joblessness of recoveries exceeds what we would expect based only on the recovery of GDP, and has caused concern among policymakers. In our latest research, we investigate whether the jobless recovery is a wider problem that plagues developed countries outside the US, and whether modern technologies may be an underlying cause (Graetz and Michaels 2017).

Related publications

In brief... Is technology to blame for jobless recoveries? Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels. Article in CentrePiece Volume 22, Issue 1, Spring 2017
Is Modern Technology Responsible for Jobless Recoveries? Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels, Centre for Economic Performance Discussion Paper No.1461, January 2017

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