Recession and Recovery Effects

The Center has an ongoing research initiative on the poverty and inequality implications of the Great Recession, an initiative that drew on a multidisciplinary team of experts and culminated in the forthcoming publication of The Great Recession (with contributions from Gary Burtless, Neil Fligstein, David Grusky, Michael Hout, Lane Kenworthy, S. Philip Morgan, Luigi Pistaferri, Robert Reich, Timothy Smeeding, Bruce Western, Chris Wimer, Edward Wolff, and others). In the next year (and beyond), we plan to continue monitoring the poverty and inequality implications of the recession and its aftermath, a follow-up initiative that entails (a) building a website hub that delivers real-time expert scholarship on the social and economic fallout of the downturn as it turns into a full-throated recovery, a more intransigent downturn, or a double-dip recession, (b) convening a new Research Group of interdisciplinary experts to produce a second book on the longer-term social and economic fallout of the recession, and (c) developing a graphing utility that allows scholars, journalists, students, and the general public to access trend data revealing the effects of the recession on labor market and other social outcomes. This RG will be be led by Michael Hout (Natalie Cohen Sociology Chair, UC-Berkeley).