Volume 12, Issue 3 - Long-Term Effects of the Great Recession

Do severe recessions associated with financial crises cause permanent reductions in potential GDP? If the economy eventually returns to its trend, does the return take longer than the return following recessions not associated with financial crises? We develop a statistical methodology appropriate for identifying and analyzing slumps, episodes that combine a contraction and an expansion and end when the economy returns to its trend growth rate. We analyze the Great Depression for the United States, severe and milder financial crises for advanced economies, severe financial crises for emerging markets, and postwar recessions for the United States and other advanced economies. The preponderance of evidence for episodes comparable with the current U.S. slump is that, while potential GDP is eventually restored, the slumps last an average of nine years. If this historical pattern holds, the Great Recession that started in 2007:Q4 will not ultimately affect potential GDP, but the Great Slump is not yet half over.

We study the responses to several questions related to real estate that were added to the Michigan Survey of Consumers in July and August of 2011. Specifically, we asked about attitudes toward renting versus buying a home; about commuting; and about how much to spend on a mortgage. By matching the results to data about relative house price declines during the recent crisis (at the ZIP-code level), we can study the relationship between the housing crash and individual attitudes. We find that younger respondents are relatively less confident about homeownership after larger declines, while older respondents are relatively more confident. In both cases, this is observed only for those with personal experience of loss (via themselves or someone close) during the crash. We find no effect on attitudes toward commuting, and we find that people who live in the high-decline areas believe it is appropriate to spend more on a mortgage.

The effect of the Great Recession on the U.S. labor market will likely persist even after economic output has recovered. Although the Great Recession did not greatly change the relative probabilities of job loss for different types of workers, the long-run impact will vary by worker characteristics. Workers who lost long-term jobs during the recession are at increased risk of future job loss due to the loss of protection afforded by long job tenure, and older displaced workers are at relatively high risk of prolonged spells of unemployment and premature retirement. The recent increase in the job vacancy rate with relatively little change in the unemployment rate suggests a decrease in the efficiency of job matching and an increase in the NAIRU. However, this phenomenon may pass once aggregate demand has increased enough to bring vacancy rates back within their normal range and extended unemployment insurance programs have expired.

This paper proposes a reform for the U.S. housing finance system in which the private sector is the main supplier of capital for housing, while the U.S. government would provide a secondary guarantee on conforming mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Competition plays a key role, with multiple firms securitizing eligible loans into government-backed MBS, both to help address the problem under which the now-dominant firms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are “too big to fail” and to help ensure that any implicit subsidy from underpriced government insurance flows through to homeowners in the form of lower interest rates. The paper discuss transition steps, including raising the price of the government guarantee, reducing the quantity of insurance offered by the government, narrowing the scope of mortgages eligible for the government insurance, and requiring firms that securitize government-insured MBS to arrange for more private capital in a first-loss position.

We analyze empirically the cyclical behavior of fiscal policy among a group of 23 OECD countries. We introduce a framework to capture the fiscal policy stance in a way that brings together automatic stabilizers and discretionary fiscal policy. We show that, for most countries, automatic changes in the budget balance play a stronger role in stabilizing output than discretionary fiscal policy. When compared across countries, changes in fiscal policy stance are predominantly linked to differences in government size. Tax revenues are close to being proportional to GDP and, combined with a relatively stable government spending, this leads to a countercyclical budget balance, which in turn helps stabilize aggregate demand. Furthermore, countries with less responsive automatic stabilizers, like the United States, tend to use countercyclical discretionary fiscal policy more aggressively. For all countries discretionary policy has become more aggressive in recent decades.