Household Credit and Employment in the Great Recession

Abstract

How much did the contraction in the supply of credit to households contribute to the decline in employment during the Great Recession? To answer this question I provide new estimates of: (1) the elasticity of employment with respect to household credit; and (2) the size of the supply shock to household credit. I exploit a county’s exposure to the collapse of a large and previously healthy lender as a natural experiment. This gives an estimated elasticity of employment with respect to household credit of 0.3, caused by declines in both housing and non-housing demand. To estimate the size of the credit supply shock I use non-parametric methods to identify lenderspecic supply-side shocks, which I then aggregate into a simple measure of credit supply shocks to counties. Combining this measure with estimates of the elasticity of employment with respect to the measure, I calculate that shocks to household credit were responsible for at least a 3.6% decline in employment from 2007 to 2010.