Similarly, with employment growth until recently having been wanting, the unemployment rate peaked more than a year and a half after the recession ended and has not yet fallen below its level at the time designated by the National Bureau of Economic Research as the economic trough.
And quite possibly the unemployment rate has been understating the amount of slack in the labor market because labor-force participation has been unusually weak, perhaps reflecting an assessment on the part of many households that job availability would be poor for those actually in the labor market. The output growth that largely defines the recovery resulted from impressive growth in labor productivity.