This paper takes advantage of access to detailed matched bank-firm data to investigate whether and how employment decisions of SMEs have been affected by credit constraints in the wake of the Great Recession. Variability in banks' financial health following the 2008 crisis is used as an...

How should regulators design effective emergency lending facilities to mitigate stigma during a financial crisis? I explore this question using data from an unexpected disclosure of partial lists of banks that secretly borrowed from the lender of last resort during the Great Depression. I find...

There are several narratives connecting the financial crisis - as well as the Great Depression of the 1930s - with the functional or personal income distribution and its pre-crisis movements. The paper investigates whether this claim can be supported with evidence showing that the crisis was...

There is considerable debate about the role of wage rigidity in explaining unemployment. Despite a large body of empirical work, no consensus has emerged on the extent of wage rigidity. Previous attempts to empirically examine wage rigidity have been hampered by small samples and measurement...

The Great Recession had a tremendous impact on low-income Americans, in particular black and Latino Americans. The losses in terms of employment and earnings are matched only by the losses in terms of real wealth. In many ways, however, these losses are merely a continuation of trends that have...

The Great Recession and the widespread adoption of fiscal austerity policies have heightened concern about inequality and how well tax-benefit systems redistribute. We examine how the distribution of income in the EU countries which were hardest hit during the recession evolved over this time....

During the Great Recession, the collapse of consumption across the U.S. varied greatly but systematically with house-price declines. We find that financial distress among U.S. households amplified the sensitivity of consumption to house-price shocks. We uncover two essential facts: (1) the...

The Great Recession and the widespread adoption of fiscal austerity policies have heightened concern about inequality and how well tax-benefit systems redistribute. We examine how the distribution of income in the EU countries which were hardest hit during the recession evolved over this time....

The paper discusses the fiscal impact of the Great Recession of 2007-08 on state and local governments in the United States. It documents the sharp decline in tax revenue and discusses how states responded to close the budget gaps in order to obey the balanced budget provisions. It highligts the...

We use a novel quarterly dataset of U.S. states to examine the dynamics and determinants of relative government spending multipliers in the decade surrounding the Great Recession. We find average multipliers that are similar to those that have been reported for the decades preceding the crisis,...