Macroeconomics Commons^™

County-Level Unemployment Dynamics Following The Covid Recession: The Effects Of Ppp Loan Take Up, Preston Antes

Honors Theses

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a nationwide shutdown, dragging the US into a recession. To combat the effects of the pandemic on the economy, Congress created the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) with the focus of preserving jobs and providing liquidity to small businesses. PPP created low-interest, forgivable business loans with forgiveness tied to a few benchmarks, providing a de facto cash transfer to small businesses. Did PPP preserve jobs? When examining Mississippi, this paper shows that counties with high cyclical unemployment participated more intensely in the program. Furthermore, the research shows that as loan totals grew within a county, local labor …

Recessionary Woes: Examining Economic Policies And Their Impact On Student Loan Debt And Housing Stability In The United States, Connor Recck

Senior Theses and Projects

Recessionary periods can seldom be avoided, but our modern public infrastructure has designed mechanisms to respond to these downturns. Economic policy has rapidly changed over the last 50 years, and the types of tools policymakers use have evolved with it. When looking at the Great Recession (2007-2009) and the COVID-19 recession (2020), a federal response structure was vital for the health of the macroeconomy. These recessionary periods serve as case studies for a review of economic policymaking activity in the United States since 2000. To examine the efficacy of the federal government’s fiscal and monetary infrastructure, policies focused on supporting …

On Income Inequality And Poverty In Egypt: Is Prosperity Immoral?, Mohamed Karim Lotfy Abdelkhalek

Theses and Dissertations

There are varying perspectives on, and divergent solutions to, the phenomena of income inequality and poverty. There seems to be polarizing views on both of these sensitive topics. One side of the argument believes income inequality should in itself be mitigated through redistribution measures, while the other argues that this should not be the focus of policy makers, as it deters them from facing the more pressing issue facing society – which is absolute poverty. The relationship between income inequality, poverty, and citizen well-being in Egypt is one that warrants further research, and this paper aims to fill this lacuna. …

Three Essays On Macroeconomic Shocks, Chase Coleman

Theses and Dissertations--Economics

This dissertation looks at the role that various macroeconomic shocks have on the economy through the lens of both macro- and micro-economic perspectives. In the macro realm, I examine the importance of how researchers measure shocks; functional shocks reveal information latent in scalar shocks. From the micro point of view, I examine the impact of a change in national tax policy.

In Chapter 2, I analyze the effect of monetary policy shocks on household consumption. Measuring shocks as shifts in the entire term structure of interest rates reveals a heterogeneous response of households to conventional and unconventional policies. I find …

A Qualitative Study On The Financial Education Of Young Black Men, Sue M. May

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

Financial literacy awareness is low among young adults, and financial literacy among Black college students is significantly lower than in other groups (Singh, 2018). However, there is little to no research on why financial literacy is so low among young Black men between 18 and 25. Few studies specifically show how financial literacy and decision-making may be related to their family economics and socialization for young Black men. Using Critical Race Theory and Family Financial Socialization theoretical frameworks, this dissertation project examined a sample of seven young self-identified Black men ages 24 to 25 years old in Northern California Bay …

An Analysis Of Demand-Pull Inflation In The United States Post-Pandemic, Isabella A. Moynihan

Honors Theses

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a global shutdown of the economy resulting from both demand and supply shocks. Also, the significant decline in output and employment in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic led to a fast reaction from the government in the form of large fiscal rescue packages. At the end of 2021, the acceleration of inflation, which had been dormant for more than four decades, became the main topic of macroeconomic debates. The debate has revolved around the influence of cost-push versus demand-pull causes of inflation. The dominant view in the United States has been that inflation resulted …