The Social and Economic Effects of the Great Recession

The Russell Sage Foundation has launched a major initiative to assess the effects of the Great Recession on the economic, political, and social life of the country. Officially over in 2009, the Great Recession is now generally acknowledged to be the most devastating global economic crisis since the Great Depression. Prolonged economic stagnation is likely to transform American institutions and severely erode the life chances of many Americans. To understand these effects across a broad swath of social and economic life, the Foundation identified 15 areas of inquiry—such as retirement, education, income and wealth—and invited proposals for innovative projects from a distinguished team of scholars.

Research

The Labor Market's Slump

Project Award

Erling Barth of the University of Oslo, James Davis of the U.S. Census Bureau and Richard Freeman of Harvard University seek to understand why U.S. businesses shed so many jobs in the recession and why the unemployment rate remains so high.

Recession Trends

Website

The Recession Trends website offers 16 policy briefs that document the effects of the downturn on wealth, consumption, the labor market, housing, poverty, the safety net, health, education, crime, attitudes, and a variety of other key domains. The site also offers a simple to use graphing utility that provides customizable graphs on key trends.

Books

The Great Recession

The Great Recession is the first authoritative assessment of how the aftershocks of the recession are affecting individuals and families, jobs, earnings and poverty, political and social attitudes, lifestyle and consumption practices, and charitable giving.

Coping with Crisis

Coping with Crisis offers a rigorous analysis of the choices societies made as the global economic crisis unfolded in 2008.

The Labor Market Four Years Into the Crisis: Assessing Structural Explanations

Four years after the beginning of the Great Recession, the labor market remains historically weak. Many observers have concluded that "structural" impediments to recovery bear some of the blame. This paper reviews such structural explanations. [...]

Multimedia
	Podcasts With support from the Foundation, the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality has created a series of podcasts featuring analyses of the social effects of the Great Recession. To listen, click here.