Estimating Okun’s law in Sweden : Effects of gender and age

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether Okun’s law is valid within Sweden. Furthermore, we are also interested in studying how it varies with different genders and age groups. Quarterly data on GDP and unemployment between the years 1980 to 2015 is used. Three different models have been tested on their ability to estimate Okun’s law and the model with the highest explanatory power was chosen. The results show that unemployment among men are more affected by changes in GDP growth than women, which likely is because more men tend to work in the private sector and women in the public sector. Young workers are also affected to a greater degree than older workers, due to how the employment protection act (LAS) works in Sweden.