The impact of New Deal expenditures on mobility during the Great Depression

By P. Fishback, W. Horrace, S. Kantor. 2006

120 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract 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 Deal’s impact on inter-county migration from 1930 to 1940. We construct a net-migration measure for each county as the difference between the Census’s 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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e8e75c505ce83334c774dec63e88d44eaaba6a89

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Citations in the corpus

Why Has Regional Convergence in the U.S. Stopped (2012, unknown): “All data come from Ferrie (2003), except birth-death method estimates from 1930-1940 are from Fishback et al. (2006).”
Was Postwar Suburbanization "White Flight"? Evidence from the Black Migration (2010, unknown): “Even when measured by race, the national survival ratio may under-state mortality in the South, leading to an overestimate of out-migration (Fishback, Horrace, and Kantor 2006).”
Estimation of Sample Selection Models with Spatial Dependence (2012, unknown): “[14] Fishback PV, Horrace WC, Kantor S.”
The Effect of Internal Migration on Local Labor Markets: American Cities during the Great Depression (2010, background): “As a result, the level of funding both between and within states varied tremendously.19 Fishback, Horrace, and Kantor (2006) study the determinants of net migration between U.S. counties in the 1930s.”