A common opposing view to our nonsense output gap series is that employment has almost fully recovered, so how can a substantial amount of labor market slack remain? Rising labor participation among women flatters the picture, which we filter out by looking at prime-age male employment. Our work points to still significant slack in Spain, Italy and Greece.

Euro periphery current account balances have almost all swung into surplus, which is often cited as positive evidence that competitiveness has been restored. But the swing to current account surplus has a big cyclical component due to still large output gaps in some cases. Adjusted for slack, Euro periphery current accounts are mostly still in deficit.

Phillips curves provide a useful lens through which to look at output gaps, since they link the degree of economic slack to the pace of underlying inflation. Estimates for structural unemployment in the Euro periphery look too high given how low inflation historically, which supports our earlier analysis that Euro periphery output gaps remain large.

We test whether Euro periphery output gaps are too narrow given weak or negative growth. If we allow for sizable 2008 GDP drops and slower trend growth since, we estimate periphery output gaps that are often twice as large as consensus numbers.