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"This paper discusses parallels between our current recession and the Great Depression for the intelligent general public. It stresses the role of economic models and ideas in public policy and argues that gold-standard mentality still holds sway today. The parallels are greatest in the generation of the crises, and they also illuminate the policy choices being made today. We have escaped a repeat of the Depression, but we appear to have lost the opportunity for significant financial reform"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

Previous research has found that in recent years immigrants had a higher propensity to unionize than did native-born workers. However, little research shows that historically marginalized immigrant workers are able to maintain newly acquired union jobs, especially during times unfavorable to unionization more generally. This comment focuses on immigrant unionization during the Great Recession of 2008 to determine whether inroads that immigrants made through organizing were maintained in hostile union environments. Using the Current Population Survey (CPS), I extend Rosenfeld and Kleykamp's (2009) models for Hispanic unionization (which end in 2007) through the recent downturn and beyond. I find that Hispanic immigrants, who held higher odds of union entry or membership in Rosenfeld and Kleykamp's pre-recession analysis, lost union jobs at an increased rate during the Great Recession compared with native-born white workers. These effects for Hispanic immigrants filtered throughout various subcategories and control variables, including years since entry, citizenship status, and nationality. These results are likely not due to immigrants' unfavorable labor market allocation, and to some degree undercut the hopes of those who view immigrants as the key to organized labor's future and organized labor as the key to immigrant prosperity.

During the Great Recession, the rate at which Americans formed households fell sharply. Though the rate has recently picked up, it isn't fast enough to make up for the shortfall in household formation that occurred over the last several years. An analysis of recent household formation patterns shows that the greatest shortfall occurred among young adults and that it is related to weak economic conditions. Housing choices have shifted as well, with a greater proportion of young households living in rental housing rather than owner-occupied homes.

AbstractObjectiveThe Great Recession of 2007‐09 was a very significant economic event with substantial effects across the economy. An important but unexplored consequence of the Great Recession is its effect on income or earnings mobility. In this paper we explore the effect of the Great Recession on earnings mobility among low‐wage workers.MethodsUsing Georgia administrative data, we identify quarterly earnings of low‐income individuals over 14 years. We calculate earnings mobility indices for 7‐year periods and explore the differences in mobility between the pre‐ and post‐Great Recession periods. We also calculate earnings mobility indices for 51 overlapping three‐year (12‐quarter) intervals over the 2000 to 2015 period.ResultsWe find that mobility is greater in the post‐Great Recession period. We also find that there is substantial variation in mobility indices in the post‐2007 period and that the variation in three‐year mobility indices is closely related to the unemployment rate.ConclusionsThe magnitude of earnings mobility was affected by the Great Recession and by the unemployment rate in general. An understanding of earnings mobility during times of economic upheaval helps policy makers better evaluate the overall impact of recessions.

This paper challenges prevailing accounts of the financial origins of the Great Recession by engaging two distinct theoretical perspectives originating in Karl Marx and Hyman Minsky. The paper argues that the domestic and global, financial and "real" origins of the crisis are deeply intertwined as the financialization of the U.S. economy and the globalization of production are inextricably linked. Thus, the merits of a Marxian interpretation of the crisis surpass those of the Minskyan for at least two reasons. First, the structural causes of the Great Recession lie not in the U.S. financial sector but in the system of globalized production which reflects the growing unevenness of capital accumulation on a planetary scale, manifested in the global imbalances. Second, the belief that social problems have monetary or financial origins, and could be resolved by tinkering with money and financial institutions, is fundamentally flawed, for the very recurrence of crises attests to the limits of fiscal and monetary policies as means to ensure "balanced" accumulation. JEL Codes: E40, E50, E60, F30, F40, F50

The Unemployment Insurance system of the United States is a federal-state partnership. It responded well to the usual frictional unemployment and to the several recessions since its creation in 1935. The recent Great Recession beginning 2008, however, was its most severe test. Numerous extended-benefit programs were called upon to aid the large number of unemployed men and women who had exhausted their benefits. This article examines the performance of the Unemployment Insurance program during that test with emphasis on coverage, benefits, funding, the Unemployment Trust Fund and the several Extended Benefit programs. In addition to the entire United States system, it focuses on the experience of the five largest states: California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas as a sample of the whole.

Data show that the United States, Europe, and even countries with lesser ties to the international financial system have suffered large permanent losses in aggregate output and employment since the financial crisis, despite unprecedented monetary injections. However, the symptoms of the Great Recession were not observed in China, despite a 45% permanent drop in its exports relative to historical trend. We study the precise channels through which the stimulus programs work in China and construct a simple model to rationalize the dramatically different impacts of stimulus programs across countries.

Nominal wage growth since the Great Recession has been sluggish. We show that the sluggishness is due mostly to weak growth in labor productivity, as well as lower-than-expected inflation. We also find that wage growth since late 2014 has actually been above what would be consistent with realized labor-productivity growth and inflation, and this trend in wages reflects an increase in labor's share of income. We show evidence that this increase in the labor share may be due to a reversal of the trend to replace labor with capital.

Cycles, Growth and the Great Recession is a collection of papers that assess the nature and role of the business cycle in contemporary economies. These assessments are made in the context of the financial market instability that distinguishes the Great Recession from previous post-war slowdowns. Theorists and applied scholars in the fields of economics and mathematical economics discuss various approaches to understanding cycles and growth, and present mathematical and applied macro models to show how uncertainty shapes cycles by affecting the economic agent choice. Also included is an empiric

America's political response to the Great Recession was surprising to pundits but mostly consistent with patterns familiar to political scientists. Ordinary citizens assessed politicians and policies primarily on the basis of visible evidence of success or failure. Thus, in 2008, the president's party was punished at the polls for the dismal state of the election-year economy. The successful challenger, Barack Obama, pushed policy significantly to the Left, as Democratic presidents typically do, provoking a predictable "thermostatic" shift to the Right in the public's policy mood. In 2010, slow economic recovery and public qualms about ideological overreach exacerbated the losses normally suffered by a president's party in midterm elections. In 2012, Obama was reelected—as incumbents almost always are when their party has held the White House for just four years—thanks in part to a modest but timely upturn in the income growth rate.