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Intro -- Contents -- Contributors -- Preface - David B. Grusky, Christopher Wimer, and Bruce Western -- Part I: Introduction -- Chapter 1. The Consequences of the Great Recession - David B. Grusky, Bruce Western and Christopher Wimer -- Chapter 2. The Roots of the Great Recession - Neil Fligstein and Adam Goldstein -- Part II: Economic Effects: The Labor Market, Income and Poverty, and Wealth and Housing -- Chapter 3. Job Loss and Unemployment - Michael Hout, Asaf Levanon, and Erin Cumberworth -- Chapter 4. Poverty and Income Inequality in the Early Stages of the Great Recession - Timothy M. Smeeding, Jeffrey P. Thompson, Asaf Levanon, and Esra Burak -- Chapter 5. How Much Wealth Was Destroyed in the Great Recession? - Edward N. Wolff, Lindsay A. Owens, and Esra Burak -- Part III. Social Effects: Consumption, Attitudes, and Family -- Chapter 6. An Analysis of Trends, Perceptions, and Distributional Effects in Consumption - Ivaylo D. Petev, Luigi Pistaferri, and Itay Saporta-Eksten -- Chapter 7. The Suprisingly Weak Effect of Recessions on Public Opinion - Lane Kenworthy and Lindsay A. Owens -- Chapter 8. The Great Recession's Influence on Fertility, Marriage, Divorce, and Cohabitation - S. Philip Morgan, Erin Cumberworth, and Christopher Wimer -- Part IV. The Collective Response: The Government and Charitable Giving -- Chapter 9. The Federal Stimulus Programs and Their Effects - Gary Burtless and Tracy Gordon -- Chapter 10. Has the Great Recession Made Americans Stingier? - Rob Reich, Christopher Wimer, Shazad Hohmed, and Sharda Jambulapati -- Index.

This paper studies the responses of unemployment in Germany, the USA and the UK to the Great Recession of 2008–9 using Beveridge curve analysis, and in the entire OECD using other techniques. It is shown that the UK suffered from recession but no structural problems; the USA suffered from structural unemployment during the recovery; Germany exhibited a much better performance both during and after the recession. The rise in OECD unemployment is broken down into parts due to aggregate activity, the construction sector and a residual attributed to policies and institutions, which is used to reach conclusions about policy.

We show that policy uncertainty about how the rising public debt will be stabilized accounts for the lack of deflation in the US economy at the zero lower bound. We first estimate a Markov-switching VAR to highlight that a zero-lower-bound regime captures most of the comovements during the Great Recession: a deep recession, no deflation, and large fiscal imbalances. We then show that a microfounded model that features policy uncertainty accounts for these stylized facts. Finally, we highlight that policy uncertainty arises at the zero lower bound because of a trade-off between mitigating the recession and preserving long-run macroeconomic stability. (JEL E31, E32, E52, E62, G01, H63)

Thomas Palley argues that the causes of the "Great Recession" are not primarily to be found in the asset bubble that was allowed to inflate in the housing market and in the financial sector. The bubbles actually reflect the longer-term basis for stagnation that originate in the macro-economic structure of the US. He presents two major dimensions of these structural problems. The first problem is the entrenchment of a "neoliberal" growth model that is hegemonic in the minds of politicians and the economics establishment that became orthodoxy in the 1980s. He then considers the second obstacle to creating a virtuous circle of demand and full employment. Secondly, Palley finds that the US model of economic engagement with the world's other economies is flawed. He ends his presentation with an alternative policy recommendation that inverts the power of corporations in favor of workers. Crisis is an inherent, inevitable, feature of capitalism in the findings of Anwar Shaikh. He demonstrates this historically by outlining its recurrence from at least two centuries of experience. Moreover, the crises are not limited to just one nation but are system-wide events. The current recession rises out of the generalized leveling off of the profit rate in the early 1980s that was achieved by driving down wages but increasing productivity. Moreover, the cost of capital has been historically low and, thus, particularly important for fueling financial bubbles. He concludes that there is little reason to believe that wages might be able to return to a greater balance with productivity growth given the power of capitalists and the growing army of reserve labor. Jeff Marick trains his lens on the corruption of Wall Street and the lack of governmental regulation of the financial sector as the two most important causes of the Great Recession. The incentives for Wall Street were at odds with a self-sustaining economy. Short-term gains, huge bonuses and gaming the sector were given priority over fiducially prudent decisions for the long-term health of financial institutions and the economy as a whole. These incentives grew out of deregulation beginning with the Reagan administration, a lack of micro-economic analysis stemming from a Grenspanian ideology of banker probity, and mass delusion that economy would continue to churn along. Madrick points to recurrent market failures from the fall of junk bond kings, to the Savings and Loans collapses, to recurrent crisis in the 1990s and the blowout of the high-tech bubble at the century's turn. Despite these warnings, the government refused to be diligent and allowed for ever-greater financial chicanery to be built with the goal of enriching corporate executives at the expense of the rest of the economy.

Contributions to this study clearly support our initial hypotheses. It is observed, as expected, that the economic crisis has considerably decreased consensual behaviour in parliament. However, the nature of parties constitutes a crucial variable in order to explain the conduct of the opposition in the legislative arena better: since the outbreak of the crisis, radical parties have turned even more adversarial than before; whereas mainstream parties - who want to appear as a credible alternative to the government in office - have drifted towards more cooperative behaviour. Given the growing influence of the European Union on the legislation approved in response to the crisis, it was also expected (and demonstrated) that the traditionally pro-European parties would be more likely to cooperate on socio-economic issues than Eurosceptic parties. Finally, it has also been shown that timing also plays an important role in the opposition's decision either to support or to oppose the government: with opposition parties more inclined to contest the government's proposals when their chances of getting into power are higher, and vice versa. Adapted from the source document.