Female unemployment in Lebanon: a time series analysis

ABSTRACT This research investigates the relationship between output and unemployment for Lebanon for the post-civil war period. Surprisingly, our results show that unemployment is not contemporaneously affected by changes in gross domestic product (i.e. no Okun’s Law), but only after a lag; however, in the long-run total unemployment and male unemployment are inversely related to changes in output. A puzzling result is the unresponsiveness of female unemployment to GDP both in the short run and in the long-run. Using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach, we try to shed some lights to explain this irregularity.