Rent burden and the Great Recession in the USA

Urban Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 226-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregg Colburn ◽  
Ryan Allen

In the aftermath of the recent recession, the percentage of households facing rent burden in the USA reached historically high levels, while cost burden for owners has shrunk. This study uses two panels from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to compare the prevalence, distribution and household responses to the phenomenon of rent burden in the USA in the years immediately before and after the Great Recession. Results suggest that rent burden has become more prevalent after the recession and that income, household composition and location are major drivers of this phenomenon, both before and after the recession. Results also indicate that exiting rent burden was more difficult in the years after the recession and that an increasingly common coping mechanism for rent burdened households is to increase their household sizes. These results indicate that renters have experienced increased financial stress related to their housing. This finding is notable given the lack of policy responses that address hardship among renter households in contrast to the privileged status enjoyed by homeowners in the policy domain.

Author(s):  
Youssef Cassis ◽  
Giuseppe Telesca

Why were elite bankers and financiers demoted from ‘masters’ to ‘servants’ of society after the Great Depression, a crisis to which they contributed only marginally? Why do they seem to have got away with the recent crisis, in spite of their palpable responsibilities in triggering the Great Recession? This chapter provides an analysis of the differences between the bankers of the Great Depression and their colleagues of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century—regarding their position within, and attitude towards the firm, work culture, mental models, and codes of conduct—complemented with a scrutiny of the public discourse on bankers and financiers before and after the two crises. The authors argue that the (relative) mildness of the Great Recession, compared to the Great Depression, has contributed to preserve elite bankers’ and financiers’ status, income, wealth, and influence. Yet, the long-term consequences of their loss of reputational capital are difficult to assess.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Tapas Paul

This dissertation addresses labor market issues. The first two chapters deal with employment issues during the great recession using nationally representative data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. The first chapter looks at the added worker effect in the great recession, the wife's labor market response to a husband loss of job. The second chapter investigates the impact of a wife's labor market participation on family poverty. The third chapter examines employment opportunities in the economics discipline using journal publication records from IDEAS/RePEc. It looks at the effect of new journal entry on the distribution of publicati


Author(s):  
Fabian T. Pfeffer ◽  
Sheldon Danziger ◽  
Robert F. Schoeni

The collapse of the labor, housing, and stock markets beginning in 2007 created unprecedented challenges for American families. This study examines disparities in wealth holdings leading up to the Great Recession and during the first years of the recovery. All socioeconomic groups experienced declines in wealth following the recession, with higher wealth families experiencing larger absolute declines. In percentage terms, however, the declines were greater for less advantaged groups as measured by minority status, education, and prerecession income and wealth, leading to a substantial rise in wealth inequality in just a few years. Despite large changes in wealth, longitudinal analyses demonstrate little change in mobility in the ranking of particular families in the wealth distribution. Between 2007 and 2011, one-fourth of American families lost at least 75 percent of their wealth, and more than half of all families lost at least 25 percent of their wealth. Multivariate longitudinal analyses document that these large relative losses were disproportionally concentrated among lower-income, less educated, and minority households.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 488-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Costas Lapavitsas ◽  
Ivan Mendieta-Muñoz

In the period following the Great Recession of 2007–2009 the financialization of the US economy reached a watershed characterized by stagnant financial profits, falling proportions of financial sector and mortgage debt, and rising proportion of public debt. The main macroeconomic indicators of financialization in the USA show structural breaks that can be dated around the period of the Great Recession. The reliance of households on the formal financial system appears to have weakened for the first time since the early 1980s. The financial sector has lacked the dynamism of the previous three decades, becoming more reliant on government. The state has increased its own indebtedness and supported large financial institutions via unconventional monetary policy measures. At the same time, state intervention has tightened the regulatory framework for big banks. The future path of financialization in the USA will depend heavily on government policy with regard to state debt and financial regulation, although the scope for boosting financialization is narrow.


2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (5) ◽  
pp. 161-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia M. Anderson ◽  
Kristin F. Butcher ◽  
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

We examine how participation in social safety net programs differs by income-to-poverty levels, and how that relationship changed after the Great Recession. We define income-to-poverty based on the average of 2 years of merged CPS data, and investigate program participation among households with income less than 300 percent of poverty. We find changes in both the level and distribution of safety-net program participation during the Great Recession, with SNAP expanding most at the bottom, the EITC expanding most in the middle, and UI expanding most at the top of the income ranges that we investigate; TANF did not expand.


2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 177-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kazuo Ueda

As the U.S. economy works through a sluggish recovery several years after the Great Recession technically came to an end in June 2009, it can only look with horror toward Japan's experience of two decades of stagnant growth since the early 1990s. In contrast to Japan, U.S. policy authorities responded to the financial crisis since 2007 more quickly. Surely, they learned from Japan's experience. I will begin by describing how Japan's economic situation unfolded in the early 1990s and offering some comparisons with how the Great Recession unfolded in the U.S. economy. I then turn to the Bank of Japan's policy responses to the crisis and again offer some comparisons to the Federal Reserve. I will discuss the use of both the conventional interest rate tool—the federal funds rate in the United States, and the “call rate” in Japan—and nonconventional measures of monetary policy and consider their effectiveness in the context of the rest of the financial system.


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