The Diverse Impacts of the Great Recession

Makoto Nakajima

Vice President and Economist

Q2 2013

Business Review — The Great Recession had a large negative impact on the U.S. economy. Asset prices, most notably stock and house prices, declined substantially, resulting in a loss in wealth for many American households.

In this article, Makoto Nakajima documents how diverse households were affected in a variety of dimensions during the Great Recession, in particular between 2007 and 2009, using newly available data from the 2007-2009 Survey of Consumer Finances. He discusses why it is important to look at the data on households, rather than focusing on the aggregate data, and he reviews some recent studies that look at the recession’s diverse effects on different types of households.

This article appeared in the Second Quarter 2013 edition of Business Review.

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