Okun’s Law expresses a relationship between economic growth and changes in the unemployment rate. Recent work by Herzon (2012) and Duy (2012) provide evidence that the relationship between growth and changes in the unemployment rate may have changed as a result of the Great Recession. I test for this by estimating the growth-unemployment relationship using a panel model across fifty U.S. states from the years 1998 to 2011 controlling for the labor force participation rate. I find that the unemployment rate has indeed been more responsive to economic growth after the Great Recession than it was before the recession and hypothesize about some reasons for this change
