Tough Decisions, Depleted Revenues: New Jersey’s Education Finances during the Great Recession
Today’s post, which complements Monday’s on New York State, considers the Great Recession’s impact on education funding in New Jersey.
How Did the Great Recession Affect New York State’s Public Schools?
Surprisingly, there is no literature on how recessions (including the Great Recession) have affected schools.
The Failure to Forecast the Great Recession
The economics profession has been appropriately criticized for its failure to forecast the large fall in U.S. house prices and its propagation first into an unprecedented financial crisis and subsequently into the Great Recession.
Helping Unemployed Borrowers Meet Their Mortgage Payments
With unemployment very high, income loss is now the primary reason for mortgage default. Unemployed homeowners face tough choices.
The Great Recession and Recovery in the Tri‑State Region
In 2008, as the financial crisis unfolded and the U.S. economy tumbled into a sharp recession, the outlook for the tri-state region (New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut) and especially New York City—the heart of the nation’s financial industry—looked grim. Regional economists feared an economic downturn as harsh as the one in 2001, or the even deeper recession of the early 1990s. Now, as the recovery takes hold, we can report that although the economic downturn was severe in the region, with the unemployment rate surging above 9 percent in many places, it was less severe than many had anticipated. This post—which is based on the New York Fed’s May 6 Regional Economic Press Briefing—recaps how the Great Recession affected employment across the region, how the ensuing recovery has progressed, and what the prospects are for job growth as we go forward.
New York City’s Economic Recovery—Main Street Gets the Jump on Wall Street
After bottoming out in late 2009, New York City’s economy has been on the road to recovery. In this post, we call attention to an unprecedented feature of the current economic recovery: overall employment in the city began to rebound from the recession well before Wall Street started adding jobs. We also consider some questions that this development naturally raises: What took Wall Street employment so long to recover? What’s been driving job generation on Main Street? What does the recent pickup in Wall Street employment suggest about the outlook for the city’s economy?
Temporary Layoffs during the Great Recession
In this post, I show that despite the depth of the Great Recession, U.S. employers did not use temporary layoffs much to cut costs. Just as they did during the previous two recessions, when firms laid workers off, they usually severed ties completely. This prevalence of permanent layoffs during the recession could slow the employment rebound over the coming months. It also raises questions about why the behavior of employers during recessions has changed.