Did the Job Ladder Fail after the Great Recession?

Job Creation Policies and the Great Recession

The adverse labor market effects of the Great Recession have intensified interest in policy efforts to spur job creation. The two most direct job creation policies are subsidies that go to workers and hiring credits that go to employers. Evidence indicates that worker subsidies are generally more effective at creating jobs. However, the unique circumstances of recovery from the Great Recession,...

The StockMarket Crash Really Did Cause the Great Recession*

This paper studies the connection between the stock market and the unemployment rate. I establish three facts. First, the log of the real value of the S&P 500 and the log of a logistic transformation of the unemployment rate are non-stationary cointegrated series. Second, the stock market Granger causes the unemployment rate. Third, the connection between changes in the real value of the stock ...

How Did the Great Recession Impact Social Preferences?∗

We compare behavior in modified dictators game during the “Great Recession” to behavior in otherwise identical experiments conducted amidst the economic boom that preceded it. The experiments capture both differences in indexical selfishness and differences in equalityefficiency tradeoffs. Subjects exposed to the recession exhibit higher levels of indexical selfishness and greater emphasis on e...

How Did Distributional Preferences Change During the Great Recession?∗

To better understand how support for redistributive policies is shaped by macroeconomic shocks, we explore how distributional preferences changed during the recent “Great Recession.” We conducted identical modified dictator games during both the recession and the preceding economic boom. The experiments capture subjects’ selfishness (the weight on one’s own payoff) and equality-efficiency trade...

The Welfare State After the Great Recession