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This paper aims to shed light on the nature of poverty as a dynamic process by examining poverty cycles, their magnitudes, and their asymmetry. The designated benchmark country is the USA due to the availability of time series data making comprehensive analyses possible. We use Harding and Pagan (2002) and the Cardinale and Taylor (2009) model to isolate poverty cycles in the U.S. during 1959–2013. Once isolated, we test the poverty cycles for duration dependency, and their synchronization with the U.S. business cycles observed over the same period. We find that poverty dynamics measured through poverty cycles differ for alternative poverty rate indicators. Another critical point is the magnitude of change in the poverty cycles. Prolonged and more volatile poverty cycles have a significant adverse impact on people and families facing them. That is particularly important for policymakers who should rethink poverty policy guidelines aimed at helping people with more volatile poverty cycles first. Our is the first study, to our knowledge, to isolate poverty cycles and focus on their nature. Poverty cycles should attract more attention from policymakers since they more accurately assess nations’ economic well-being than output (GDP).

The great decoupling is real. Productivity and employment/wages link changed after 1980 in many countries, not just the U.S. This study investigates the productivity and employment/wages link (1950–2014) looking for empirical proof of the “great decoupling” put forward by Brynjolfsson and Mcafee (2013). The results should stimulate policymakers to openly question why real wages and productivity don’t line up with the theory. We use the Hodrick and Prescott (1997) filter to isolate trends in real wages, labor share in GDP, and labor productivity and rolling correlation to explore if the great decoupling is real. We have found that the great decoupling i.e. The divergence between real wages/employment and productivity is present in all countries (10 in the sample). The dynamics of the great decoupling are however different between the countries although year 1980 seems to be a dominant breaking point for the start of the phenomena. This paper provides multicounty empirical proof of the presence of the great decoupling phenomena and explores its dynamics over 1950–2014. Policy makers as well as firms and unions should take the existence of this phenomena seriously since it can have significant consequences on economic growth and labor markets’ functioning.