The Economic Impact of the New Deal

新政的经济影响

• 批准号: 0214395
• 负责人: Shawn Kantor
• 金额: $ 39.28万
• 依托单位: National Bureau of Economic Research Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2002
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2002-08-01 至 2006-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0214395&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Economic; Impact; New; Deal

Faced with an economy in recession, policy-makers today have proposed a variety of federal programs and projects that they believe will stimulate the sluggish economy. An underlying premise of the recent stimulus proposals is that the federal government can successfully use fiscal policy to grow the economy. The objective of this research is to better understand the economic impact of such fiscal stimulus. Perhaps the greatest example of federal peace-time fiscal intervention was the New Deal in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced a myriad of programs designed to aid in the "relief, recovery, and reform" of the depressed economy. Despite the great importance of this remarkable episode of U.S. economic history, there has been very little attempt to quantitatively analyze the economic effects of the New Deal. To help fill this gap this project will provide a series of studies on the impact of the New Deal on a variety of measures of economic activity, including real estate wealth, housing values and construction, retail sales, manufacturing activity, agricultural development, criminal behavior, as well as demographic changes attributable to the New Deal. Since most of the research focuses on the impact of the New Deal at the county level, it is important to control for spillover effects from New Deal spending in neighboring counties and economic activity in neighboring areas. In addition, there may be unmeasurable economic shocks in one county that might spillover into neighboring counties. Measuring the impact of the New Deal on local economies is complicated further because in most cases we probably cannot treat New Deal spending as purely exogenous. New Deal expenditures might have been related to economic activity in conflicting ways. Given the stated goals of the New Deal, we might anticipate that the New Dealers distributed more resources to areas with lower incomes or to areas with higher unemployment or slower growth. On the other hand, many of the New Deal programs required that the state or local government have the resources to seek help for projects from the federal government or go even further by providing matching funds to help finance the projects. Thus, New Deal spending might have been positively related to measures of economic activity. To deal with the geographic spillover effects and simultaneity issues, we have adopted an econometric model that incorporates both the simultaneous relationship between New Deal spending and economic activity and the spatial correlation inherent in the deterministic and random components of the empirical model. This research program takes advantage of the new developments in spatial econometric theory that enable researchers to better understand the impact of public policy, while controlling for the geographic spillovers and simultaneity problems that inevitably undermine precise measurement. Providing a better understanding of the economic impact of the New Deal is highly valuable on at least two general levels. First, despite the significance of the Great Depression and the New Deal to U.S. economic history, very little is known about the economic consequences of President Roosevelt's experiment. Therefore, this research will add significantly to the history of the Great Depression. Second, the usefulness of government spending to stimulate a stagnant economy remains a deeply controversial modern public policy debate. Thus, one of the central goals of this research project is to shed light on this question by looking to a time when government intervention was likely to have the greatest impact - the Great Depression.

面对经济衰退，决策者们提出了各种各样的联邦计划和项目，他们认为这些计划和项目将刺激低迷的经济。 最近刺激计划的一个基本前提是，联邦政府能够成功地利用财政政策来促进经济增长。 本研究的目的是更好地了解这种财政刺激的经济影响。 也许联邦政府和平时期财政干预的最好例子是富兰克林总统的新政。罗斯福推出了无数的计划，旨在帮助“救济，复苏和改革”萧条的经济。 尽管这一非凡的事件在美国经济史上非常重要，但很少有人试图对新政的经济影响进行定量分析。 为了帮助填补这一空白，本项目将提供一系列关于新政对各种经济活动措施的影响的研究，包括真实的房地产财富、住房价值和建筑、零售、制造业活动、农业发展、犯罪行为以及新政造成的人口变化。 由于大多数研究集中在县一级的新政的影响，重要的是要控制的溢出效应，新政支出在邻近县和邻近地区的经济活动。 此外，一个县可能会出现无法衡量的经济冲击，这些冲击可能会蔓延到邻近的县。 衡量新政对地方经济的影响更加复杂，因为在大多数情况下，我们可能不能将新政支出视为纯粹的外源性支出。 新政支出可能以相互矛盾的方式与经济活动相关。 鉴于新政的既定目标，我们可以预期新政者将更多的资源分配给收入较低的地区或失业率较高或增长较慢的地区。 另一方面，许多新政计划要求州或地方政府有资源向联邦政府寻求项目帮助，或者更进一步，提供匹配资金来帮助资助项目。 因此，新政支出可能与经济活动的衡量标准呈正相关。 为了处理地理溢出效应和不确定性问题，我们采用了一个计量经济学模型，该模型结合了新政支出和经济活动之间的同步关系以及经验模型中确定性和随机成分所固有的空间相关性。 该研究计划利用了空间计量经济学理论的新发展，使研究人员能够更好地了解公共政策的影响，同时控制不可避免地破坏精确测量的地理溢出和不确定性问题。 至少在两个一般层面上，更好地理解新政的经济影响是非常有价值的。 首先，尽管大萧条和新政对美国经济史具有重要意义，但人们对罗斯福总统实验的经济后果知之甚少。 因此，这项研究将大大增加大萧条的历史。 其次，政府支出对刺激停滞经济的效用仍然是一个极具争议的现代公共政策辩论。 因此，本研究项目的中心目标之一是通过观察政府干预可能产生最大影响的时期--大萧条--来阐明这个问题。