The Economic Impact of the New Deal

面对经济衰退，决策者们今天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。最近的刺激方案的一个基本前提是，联邦政府能够成功地利用财政政策促进经济增长。本研究的目的是更好地理解这种财政刺激的经济影响。也许联邦和平时期财政干预的最伟大的例子是富兰克林·d·罗斯福（Franklin D. Roosevelt）总统推出的新政（New Deal），旨在帮助“缓解、恢复和改革”萧条的经济。尽管这一事件在美国经济史上具有重要意义，但很少有人尝试对新政的经济影响进行定量分析。为了帮助填补这一空白，该项目将提供一系列关于新政对各种经济活动指标的影响的研究，包括房地产财富、住房价值和建筑、零售销售、制造业活动、农业发展、犯罪行为以及归因于新政的人口变化。由于大多数研究都集中在县一级的新政影响上，因此控制新政在邻近县的支出和邻近地区的经济活动的溢出效应是很重要的。此外，一个县可能出现无法衡量的经济冲击，并可能溢出到邻近的县。衡量新政对当地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纯粹视为外生因素。新政支出可能以相互矛盾的方式与经济活动相关。考虑到新政的既定目标，我们可以预期，新政将更多的资源分配给收入较低、失业率较高或增长较慢的地区。另一方面，许多新政项目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，提供配套资金来帮助资助项目。因此，新政支出可能与经济活动指标呈正相关。为了处理地理溢出效应和同时性问题，我们采用了一个计量经济模型，该模型既包含了新政支出与经济活动之间的同时性关系，也包含了实证模型中确定性和随机成分固有的空间相关性。本研究项目利用空间计量经济学理论的新发展，使研究人员能够更好地理解公共政策的影响，同时控制不可避免地破坏精确测量的地理溢出和同时性问题。更好地理解新政的经济影响至少在两个一般层面上是非常有价值的。首先，尽管大萧条和新政在美国经济史上具有重要意义，但人们对罗斯福总统实验的经济后果知之甚少。因此，这项研究将对大萧条的历史有重要的贡献。其次，政府支出对刺激停滞的经济是否有用，在现代公共政策辩论中仍是一个极具争议的话题。因此，本研究项目的中心目标之一是通过考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。

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.