(A)symetria v Okunovom zákone v štátoch Vyšehradskej skupiny

Abstract

Having regard to the importance of the compensation effect between output and unemployment known as Okun's law for both contemporary economic theory and for practical economic policy, the intent of the paper is to examine the empirical validity of Okun's law for the four Visegrad Group countries with consideration given to possible asymmetry. Using the quarterly data for the period from Q1/1998 and Q2/2014 and its gap version, Okun's law is verifi ed for each investigated country and some specifi cs of labour markets are highlighted so as to explain the magnitude of the estimated Okun's coeffi cients. The contribution of the paper is two-fold. First, this empirical relationship is confi rmed in validity with attention directed to the foursome of countries. Second, the analysis utilizes the non-linear ARDL model proposed in the paper to accommodate possible nonlinearity and asymmetry in Okun's law. Asymmetry is found and economically reasoned by the specifi cs of the labour market only for Slovakia since there appears to be a different reaction of the unemployment gap to positive output gap and to negative one.