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"If there was any time to expect a large peace-time multiplier effect from federal spending in the states, it would have been during the period from 1930 through 1940 when unemployment rates never fell below 10 percent and there was ample idle capacity. We develop an annual panel data set for the 48 continental states from 1930 through 1940 with evidence on federal government grants, loans, and tax collections and a variety of measures of economic activity. Using panel data methods we estimate a multiplier, defined as the change in per capita economic activity in response to an additional dollar per capita of federal funds. For personal income, which includes transfer payments as income, the estimate ranges from 0.91 for the combination of government grants and loans to 1.39 when only grants are considered. It is important to distinguish between the effects of farm subsidies and the combination of public works and relief grants. The personal income multiplier for public works and relief was around 1.67, while the effect of farm payments to take land out of production reduced personal income by 0.57. Multipliers for a more production-based measure of state income per capita after removing nonwork relief transfers and adding back payroll taxes are about 10 to 15 percent smaller. The multiplier for wages and salaries was substantially less than one, as was the multiplier for retail sales. The impact of the federal spending on employment was negligible and may have been negative. The results may help explain why measures of income have recovered more rapidly than measures of employment in both the 1930s and in the current era"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"One of the most difficult problems in the social sciences is measuring the policy climate in societies. Prior to the 1930s the vast majority of labor regulations in the U.S. were enacted at the state level. In this paper we develop several summary measures of labor regulation that document the changes in labor regulation across states and over time during the Progressive Era. The measures include an Employer-Share-Weighted Index (ESWI) that weights regulations by the share of workers affected and builds up the overall index from 17 categories of regulation; the number of pages of laws; appropriations for spending on labor issues per worker; and two nonparametric COORDINATES that summarize locations in a policy space. We describe the pluses and minuses of the measures, how strongly they are correlated, and show the stories that they tell about the changes in labor regulation during the progressive era. We then provide preliminary evidence on the extent to which the labor regulation measures are associated with political and economic correlates identified as important in histories of industrial relations and labor markets"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"Well Worth Saving tells the story of the disastrous housing market during the Great Depression and the extent to which an immensely popular New Deal relief program, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), was able to stem foreclosures by buying distressed mortgages from lenders and refinancing them. Drawing on historical records and modern statistical tools, Price Fishback, Jonathan Rose, and Kenneth Snowden investigate important unanswered questions to provide an unparalleled view of the mortgage loan industry throughout the 1920s and early '30s. Combining this with the stories of those involved, the book offers a clear understanding of the HOLC within the context of the housing market in which it operated, including an examination of how the incentives and behaviors at play throughout the crisis influenced the effectiveness of policy." --