An examination of Okun's law: evidence from regional areas in Greece

This paper estimates Okun's coefficient for certain regional areas in Greece over the period 1960-1997. Through the Hodrick-Prescott filtering and the band-pass filtering the empirical analysis shows that that the coefficients do not exhibit substantial interregional differences, except for the cases of Epirus and North Aegean Islands. In these two cases, the estimates are larger than the regional average under both detrending methodologies. The empirical findings also show that Okun's relationship undergoes a structural change in 1981. After this break, unemployment becomes less responsive to output changes in all regional areas.