Post-2008 Recession Research Articles

Measuring the Total Number of US Job Seekers

Abstract I document a substantial rise in the proportion of job seekers who are classified as out of the labour force in the United States since 1980. I propose an adjusted unemployment rate to account for these searchers; the adjustment increases the unemployment rate by 5.2 percentage points, rids the unemployment rate of its downward trend and decreases volatility by 50%. I also construct a measure of total search effort in the economy, including employed job seekers. Finally, estimates of the Phillips curve using the adjusted unemployment rate or total searcher rate show no sign of a flattening output-inflation relationship in the post-2008 recession period.

Informing Policy and Responding to Crisis

This article explores historians’ role in shaping public policy amid crises through the programs of the Idaho State Historical Society (ISHS). ISHS navigated the post-2008 recession, aligning with the History Relevance Campaign to redefine history’s societal value and develop a legislative outreach program. This article encapsulates the ISHS’s journey and history’s power—through the agency’s new briefing paper program—to inform, unite, guide policy, and promote informed governance. The article describes the author’s workflow, which features traditional research methodology and adaptable project management philosophies and stresses the value of searchable research libraries as a framework for historians to manage multiple projects.

The morbid romance of the good job: News and the emotional social imaginary in late capitalism

The question of how to identify and secure ‘good’ jobs has long confounded researchers, politicians and workers alike, and seems only to have intensified post-2008 recession and with the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, late capitalism seems to be defined by a widening disconnect between the optimism of economic indicators and the grim reality of many people’s everyday working lives and livelihoods. Yet, hope that good jobs will guarantee a good future stubbornly persists, with profound consequences for public investments of all kinds. Research on the social imaginary has explored how common-sense ideas come to grip us through discourse. At the same time, research into the politics of emotion and affect has demonstrated how public feelings like hope might attach us to (and entrap us in) particular economic circuits and futures. However, scholars in these fields have not adequately addressed how emotion shapes the social imaginary in everyday discourse. Yet, understanding how emotion might form specific social imaginaries of ‘good jobs’, and attach publics to them, is vital to understanding how and why we keep deeply investing in economic systems that injure our wellbeing, equity and environment. Here, we address this gap by tracking feelings, figures and metaphors in a case study of news about jobs in a moment of crisis. We theorise what emerges as a ‘morbid romance’, a romantic, gendered, mythical ideal of good industrial jobs and good entrepreneurship that is always haunted by a morbid awareness of the threat of job loss, bad jobs and post-industrial death. Beyond our case study, as the pandemic produces profound shifts in working lives, we argue that the morbid romance of the good job can help us to understand the structure of feeling and social horizon of late capitalism.

Austerity and gender inequalities in Europe in times of crisis

The post-2008 recession and the countercyclical responses by European governments that followed triggered an extensive wave of fiscal adjustments. Although underpinned by widespread consensus, the implementation of such measures has also been severely criticised. While their effect on output and employment has been extensively investigated, their impact on wage inequality has received less attention. In this paper, we focus on the consequences of fiscal consolidation measures for gender inequality. After describing the literature-based conceptual framework of our analysis, we provide empirical evidence of the effect of fiscal consolidation on: (i) the adjusted gender wage gap, and (ii) the patterns of gender horizontal segregation. The analysis covers EU-28 countries in the years 2010–13. Results show that austerity measures (both tax-based and expenditure-based) impacted significantly on various aspects of gender wage inequality, putting at risk the relatively little progress achieved in Europe so far.

The resilience and vulnerability of remote mountain communities: The case of Vent, Austrian Alps

Building on critical community resilience studies, this study analyses the resilience of the village of Vent, a remote mountain community in the Austrian Otztal valley challenged by slow-onset disturbances such as climate change, outmigration of young people and the repercussions of the post-2008 recession. A conceptual framework which focuses on how well economic, social, cultural, political and natural domains are developed within a community, is used as the conceptual springboard to assess the resilience of Vent. The study highlights that Vent is facing substantial resilience challenges and that the community is particularly vulnerable (weak resilience) with regard to the political and natural domains, is only moderately resilient in economic and social terms, and that only the cultural domain emerges as strongly resilient. Overall, Vent is, at most, moderately resilient in the face of continuing and future shocks/disturbances. The study interrogates current resilience frameworks and suggests that an approach based on the five resilience domains provides a richly textured framework for understanding the subtleties of resilience pathways, all the while acknowledging that obtaining a relatively complete picture of resilience is easier in small (and geographically bounded) communities.

Changes in directly alcohol-attributable mortality during the great recession by employment status in Spain: a population cohort of 22 million people

BackgroundMacroeconomic fluctuations can impact differentially on alcohol-related problems across sociodemographic groups. We assess trend changes in directly alcohol-attributable (DAA) mortality in the population aged 25–64 during the post-2008 recession in...

Government-Nonprofit Relations in Times of Recession.

Government-Nonprofit Relations in Times of Recession. Edited by Rachel LaForest. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2013, 2016, pp. ISBN: 978553393276.Government-Nonprofit Relations in Times of Recession seeks to illustrate the relationship fostered between governments and nonprofits prior to, during, and following the 2008 economic crisis. The edited collection effectively maps out and interrogates, both historically and contemporaneously, the relations between government and nonprofits. The book also investigates organizational trends both globally and in different national contexts.The book consists of a series of essays emerging from the 10th Annual National Forum of the Public Policy and Third Sector Initiative conference, held in Toronto in 2011. Published in 2013, it is the sixth volume of the Public Policy and Third Sector Initiative series from the School of Policy Studies at Queen?s University. Previous books in the series have also addressed the role of the social economy in the wider policy landscape. By way of comparative illustration, The New Federal Policy Agenda and the Voluntary Sector: On the Cutting Edge, published in 2009 by the same editor, Rachel LaForest, examined the relationship between the government and social economy organizations during Stephan Harper?s Conservative era. This earlier edited book differs from the editor?s newer publication in both time and place. Whereas the first book understands changes in the government-social economy relationship through a Liberal versus Conservative lens, LaForest?s second edited book in the series, Government-Nonprofit Relations in Time of Recession, approaches the dynamics of the relationship from a pre- and post-2008 recession perspective. Moreover, the former book considers policy issues in Canada, whereas the latter explores the policy climate in an array of national arenas. Given the impact of the 2008 crisis on the nonprofit sector on a global scale, this book is valuable for further understanding the implications of financial and administrative challenges and losses for nonprofits caused by the recession, while illustrating and proposing effective responses to these challenges.LaForest's 2013 edited book can be treated as examining three dimensions applicable to government-nonprofit interactions: funding, workforce, and the ecology of the nonprofit and public sectors. First, the administration of funding is perhaps the most telling sign of the state of government-nonprofit relations, both historically and post2008 recession. The chapters describe the variety of ways that funding losses may occur, how they consequently endanger the survival of nonprofits, and the ensuing responses of government. Second, the nonprofit labour pool is another dimension considered throughout the collection. In this regard, the chapters explore the ways in which the nonprofit workforce has undergone structural and contextual changes as a result of the 2008 recession, how these changes challenge nonprofit organizations, and ultimately, how these changes challenge their relations with government. Third, and consistently examined throughout the chapters, is the effect of the 2008 recession on the wider network of government-nonprofit relations; that is, the "ecology" (including networks) that encompasses multiple levels of government and a wide array of nonprofit organizations. This macro-level dimension allows authors to delve into the ways that the 2008 recession has not only impacted relations between individual organizations and governments, but how the crisis has also had rippling effects beyond these relations, thus transforming the landscape in which all actors interact. Combined, these three dimensions lend the reader crucial insight into the far-reaching scope and nature of government-nonprofit relations. Although these three dimensions- funding, workforce, ecology/networks-normally exist in government-nonprofit relations by convention, attempts have been made to formalize these relations, leading to their institutionalization. …

High-Involvement Management, Economic Recession, Well-Being, and Organizational Performance

High-involvement management was introduced as a means of overcoming economic crises, but it has been argued that the inevitability of cost-cutting measures when organizations face such crises would undermine its efficacy. This article first presents theories of why tensions may exist between high-involvement management and actions typically taken by management during recessions, such as wage and employment freezes. It then reports research aimed at testing whether the performance effects of high-involvement management were lower in organizations where management took such actions to combat the post-2008 recession, due to their adverse effects on employees’ job satisfaction and well-being—and even whether high-involvement management still had a performance premium after the recession. Using data from Britain’s Workplace Employment Relations Survey of 2011, the research shows that both dimensions of high-involvement management—role- and organizational-involvement management—continued to be positively associated with economic performance as the economy came out of recession. Recessionary actions were negatively related to both employee job satisfaction and well-being, while job satisfaction mediated the relationship between role-involvement management and economic performance, which is consistent with mutual-gains theory. However, recessionary action reduced the positive effect that role-involvement management had on job satisfaction and well-being and thus may have reduced its positive performance effects. In the case of organizational-involvement management, it reduced the level of job dissatisfaction and ill-being, suggesting that it may provide workers with more information and greater certainty about the future.

The geography of the economic crisis in Europe: national macroeconomic conditions, regional structural factors and short-term economic performance

This paper explores the linkages between pre-2008 crisis national macro-economic conditions, regional resistance factors and depth of the crisis in the regions of the EU27. The results suggest that only a limited set of macro-economic factors shape the regional reaction to the crisis. A healthy current account surplus is associated with stronger economic performance during the post-2008 recession. Conversely, high public debt countries are more successful in sheltering their regional economies in the short-run. When looking at regional-level resistance, human capital is the single most important positive factor. Conversely, research and development-intensive regions are more exposed to negative shocks.

‘All in it Together’? Ethnoreligious Labour-Market Penalties and the Post-2008 Recession in the UK

The existence of ethnic penalties in the operations of the UK labour market is well established, although many studies have focused upon only unemployment and income as measures of labour-market performance. Few have looked at changes in those penalties over time, especially during a period including a major recent recession, and whether they were experienced widely throughout the population—whether people were ‘all in it together’ according to the government's rhetoric defending its post-2010 austerity programme. This paper evaluates that claim's validity by exploring differences among eighteen separate ethnoreligious groups across a wider range of labour-market performance measures: it assesses not only whether there were ethnic penalties throughout the period but also whether they were exacerbated during the recession that began in 2008. Statistical modelling shows that many were indeed exacerbated—in the percentage employed part-time rather than full-time, the percentage overqualified for their chosen jobs, the percentage of older adults who become economically inactive prematurely, and income levels—but not unemployment levels. Muslim groups, especially those from Asia, suffered the most extensive penalties, and the greatest exacerbation of them during the recession.