- Tale of Two Recessions: 2008 and 2020

Catalog description

This course compares the two most recent recessions in the United States: The Great Recession of 2007-09 and the Covid-19 recession of 2020. Special attention is paid to the housing bubble that preceded the Great Recession and how the housing sector crisis spread to the rest of the economy. The responses of monetary, fiscal, and regulatory policies are explored in depth for both recessions. The disappointing rate of recovery after the official end of the Great Recession and the persistently high unemployment rate due to the COVID-19 recession are also studied. This course focuses on refining students’ quantitative theoretical and empirical skills and applying them to recent macroeconomic events. Both recessions are extraordinarily complex. Concepts and methodologies from diverse areas including macroeconomics, microeconomics, law, finance, political science, and other disciplines contribute to understanding these phenomena. Students will write a research paper that draws on existing tools-based knowledge from prerequisite courses and examines a topic related to the Great Recession and/or the COVID-19 recession that the course does not cover in detail.