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 and Verdoorn's Laws explain 87 percent of all the variations in labor productivity....

We develop the first disaggregation of Okun's law that quantifies all of the information that is subsumed within its coefficients. The proposed method decomposes the coefficients into the sum of the direct effect of the change in output upon the unemployment rate, plus the indirect effects of...

Why did productivity rise during recent recessions? One possibility is that average worker quality increased. A second is that each incumbent worker produced more. The second effect is termed “making do with less.” Using data from 2006 to 2010 on individual worker productivity from a large...