During the New Deal the Roosevelt Administration dramatically expanded relief spending to combat extraordinarily high rates of unemployment. We examine the dynamic relationships between relief spending and local private labor markets using a new panel data set of monthly relief, private...

During the Great Depression contemporaries worried that people hit by hard times would resort to crime. President Franklin Roosevelt argued that the massive government relief efforts “struck at the roots of crime” by providing subsistence income to needy families. After constructing a panel...

The Great Depression offers a unique laboratory to investigate the causal impact of migration on local labor markets. We use variation in the generosity of New Deal programs and extreme weather events to instrument for migrant flows to and from U.S. cities. In-migration had little effect on the...

The critical election of 1932 represented a turning point in the future electoral successes of the Democrats and Republicans for over three decades. This paper seeks to measure the importance of the New Deal in facilitating the Democrats' control of the federal government well into the 1960s. We...

Problems with mortgage financing are widely considered to be a major cause of the recent financial meltdown. Several modern programs have been designed to mimic the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) of the 1930s. We analyze the impact of the HOLC on the nonfarm rental and owned home markets...

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was associated with a population shift in the United States in the 1930s. Evaluating the relationship between the AAA and the incidence of malaria can therefore offer important lessons regarding the broader consequences of demographic changes. Using a...