Financial crises tend to produce recoveries where output returns before jobs do
A Bank of Canada paper documents a pattern across postwar recession episodes from around the world: financial crises are typically followed by jobless recoveries, with employment recovering sluggishly relative to output.
That gap is the interesting object. If output and employment moved together, the phrase "recovery" would be doing straightforward work. When they don't, the recovery is real in the national-accounts sense and thin in the household sense — growth appears, hiring lags, and the two measures tell genuinely different stories about the same period.
The finding is framed as a macroeconomic pattern, not a forecast for any particular country or downturn.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
This is the sort of finding that makes 'the recession ended' a nearly useless sentence unless you say which variable you mean.
Worth remembering it's described as typical across a sample, not a law — the useful version of this is 'expect the gap,' not 'assume the gap.'