During the Great Depression, as today, migrants were accused of taking jobs and crowding relief rolls. At the time, protest concerned internal migrants rather than the foreign born. We investigate the effect of net migration on local labor markets, instrumenting for migrant flows to a destination with extreme weather events and variation in New Deal programs in typical sending areas. Migration had little effect on the hourly earnings of existing residents. Instead, migration prompted some residents to move away and others to lose weeks of work and/or access to relief jobs. Given the period's high unemployment, these lost work opportunities were costly to existing residents.

We estimate the local spillovers from research university activity in a sample of urban counties. We use the fact that universities tend to follow a rigid endowment spending policy based on the market value of their endowments to identify the causal effect of university activity on labor income in the non-education sector. Our instrument for university expenditures is based on the interaction between each university's lagged endowment level and the variation in stock market shocks over time. We find statistically significant spillover effects from university activity, and the magnitude of the spillover is significantly larger when local universities are more research intensive or when firms are technologically closer to universities, as measured by labor market pooling and patent citations. The findings provide a rationale for place-based university policies, so long as they focus on industry fundamentals. The results also suggest that the longer-term effects that universities have on their local economies may grow over time as the composition of local industries evolve to take advantage of the knowledge spillovers we identify.

The article examines the impact of New Deal relief programs on infant mortality, non-infant mortality, and general fertility rates in major U.S. cities between 1929 and 1940. Effects are estimated using a variety of specifications and techniques for a panel of 114 cities that reported information on relief spending between 1929 and 1940. The significant rise in relief spending during the New Deal contributed to reductions in infant mortality, suicide rates, and some other causes of death, while contributing to increases in the general fertility rate. Similar to Ruhm's (2000) findings for the modern United States, the article finds that many types of death rates were pro-cyclical during the 1930s. Estimates of the relief costs associated with saving a life (adjusted for inflation) are similar to those found in studies of modern social insurance programs. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Using data on New Deal grants to each U.S. county from 1933 to 1939, we estimate how relief and public works spending and payments to farmers through the Agricultural Adjustment Administration influenced retail consumption. On a per capita basis, we find that an additional dollar of public works and relief spending was associated with a 44 cent increase in 1939 retail sales. In contrast, the AAA seems to have had a negative effect on retail sales, suggesting that nonlandowners in the farm sector suffered disproportionate declines in income as a result of the AAA.

We examine the importance of Roosevelt's "relief, recovery, and reform" motives to the distribution of New Deal funds across over 3,000 U.S. counties, program by program. The major relief programs most closely followed Roosevelt's three R's. Other programs were tilted more in favor of areas with higher incomes. For all programs spending for political advantage in upcoming elections was a significant factor. Roosevelt's successful reelections were based on developing specific programs for a broad range of constituents, delivering on his stated goals, but also spending more at the margin for political purposes.

No abstract

The spatial concentration of ideas is central to economic geography. Yet, how proximity to research affects productivity is not well studied. We use the late 19 th century establishment of agricultural experiment stations in the United States to estimate the importance of proximity to research for productivity growth. Our analysis of county-level agricultural census data from 1870 to 2000 reveals three results. First, research proximity effects from permanent station opening grew for about 20 years and then subsequently declined until becoming largely absent today. Second, proximity to station-based innovations affected local farmers' productivity for 20 to 40 years after the discovery. Third, research proximity effects remain today where stations historically focused on basic research and where nearby farmers were producing with frontier technology. Persistence in research proximity effects depend not just on research infrastructure, but also persistence in idea production and the cumulative effects of learning.

Using county-level data on federal New Deal expenditures on public works and relief and Agricultural Adjustment Administration payments to farmers, this paper empirically examines the New Deals impact on inter-county migration from 1930 to 1940. We construct a net-migration measure for each county as the difference between the Censuss reported population change from 1930 to 1940 and the natural increase in population (births minus infant deaths minus non-infant deaths) over the same period. Our empirical approach accounts for both the simultaneity between New Deal allocations and migration and the geographic spillovers that likely resulted when economic activity in one county may have affected the migration decisions of people in neighboring counties. We find that greater spending on relief and public works was associated with significant migration into counties where such money was allocated. The introduction of our modern farm programs under the aegis of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration appears to have contributed to a net out-migration that sped the transition of people out of farming.