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Why Has the US Economy Recovered So Consistently from Every Recession in the Past 70 Years?

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  • Robert E. Hall
  • Marianna Kudlyak

Abstract

A remarkable fact about the historical US business cycle is that, after unemployment reached its peak in a recession, and a recovery begins, the annual reduction in the unemployment rate is stable at around one tenth of the current level of unemployment. We document this fact in a companion paper, Hall and Kudlyak (2020a). Here, we consider explanations for the surprising consistency of recoveries. We show that the evolution of the labor market from recession to recovery involves more than the direct effect of persistent unemployment of job-losers from the recession shock---unemployment during the recovery is above normal for people who did not lose jobs during the recession. We explore models of the labor market's self-recovery that imply gradual working off of unemployment following a recession shock. We emphasize the feedback from high unemployment to the forces driving job creation. These models also explain why the recovery of market-wide unemployment is so much slower than the rate at which individual unemployed workers find new jobs. The reasons include the fact that the path that individual job-losers follow back to stable employment often includes several brief interim jobs.
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Suggested Citation

  • Robert E. Hall & Marianna Kudlyak, 2022. "Why Has the US Economy Recovered So Consistently from Every Recession in the Past 70 Years?," NBER Macroeconomics Annual, University of Chicago Press, vol. 36(1), pages 1-55.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucp:macann:doi:10.1086/718588
    DOI: 10.1086/718588
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    Cited by:

    1. Dupraz, Stéphane & Nakamura, Emi & Steinsson, Jón, 2025. "A plucking model of business cycles," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 152(C).
    2. Brad Hershbein & Bryan A. Stuart, 2024. "The Evolution of Local Labor Markets after Recessions," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 16(3), pages 399-435, July.
    3. John V Winters, 2022. "Young and hungry? Employment levels for young people during Spring 2021," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 42(2), pages 643-652.
    4. Olivier Blanchard, 2025. "Convergence? Thoughts About the Evolution of Mainstream Macroeconomics over the Last 40 Years," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2025, volume 40, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Kandoussi, Malak & Langot, François, 2020. "The Lockdown Impact on Unemployment for Heterogeneous Workers," IZA Discussion Papers 13439, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    6. Congressional Budget Office, 2022. "A Markov-Switching Model of the Unemployment Rate: Working Paper 2022-05," Working Papers 57582, Congressional Budget Office.
    7. Kurt Graden Lunsford, 2020. "Recessions and the Trend in the US Unemployment Rate," Economic Commentary, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, vol. 2021(01), pages 1-8, February.
    8. Kandoussi, Malak & Langot, François, 2025. "Modeling and evaluating the heterogeneous impacts of the COVID-19 on US unemployment," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 143(C).
    9. Hall, Robert E. & Kudlyak, Marianna, 2022. "The unemployed with jobs and without jobs," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 79(C).
    10. Malak Kandoussi & Fran ois Langot, 2021. "On the heterogeneous impacts of the COVID-19 lockdown on US unemployment," TEPP Working Paper 2021-01, TEPP.
    11. Hall, Robert E. & Kudlyak, Marianna, 2022. "The inexorable recoveries of unemployment," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 131(C), pages 15-25.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
    • J63 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Turnover; Vacancies; Layoffs
    • J64 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search

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