Migration Creation, Diversion, and Retention: New Deal Grants and Migration: 1935-1940

Todd Sorensen, Price Fishback, Samuel K. Allen () and Shawn Kantor
Additional contact information
Samuel K. Allen: Virginia Military Institute

No 3060, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: During the 1930s the federal government embarked upon an ambitious series of grant programs designed to counteract the Great Depression. Public works and relief programs combated unemployment by hiring workers and building social overhead capital while the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) sought to raise farm incomes by paying farmers not to produce. The amounts distributed varied widely across the country and potentially contributed to population shifts. We examine the extent to which New Deal spending affected domestic migration patterns in the second half of the 1930s. We estimate an aggregate discrete choice model, in which household heads choose among 466 economic subregions. The structural model allows us to decompose the effects of program spending on migration into three categories: the effect of spending on keeping households in their origin (retention), the effect of pulling non-migrants out of their origin (creation), and the effect of causing migrants to substitute away from an alternative destination (diversion). An additional dollar of public works and relief spending increased net migration into an area primarily by retaining the existing population and creating new migration into the county. Only a small share of the increase in net migration rate was caused by diversion of people who had already chosen to migrate. AAA spending contributed to net out migration, primarily by creating new out migrants and repelling potential in migrants. A counterfactual analysis that examines what would have happened had there been no New Deal spending during the 1930s suggests that the uneven distribution of New Deal public works and relief spending explains about twelve percent of the internal migration flows in the United States between 1935 and 1940. The uneven distribution of AAA spending accounted for about one percent.

Keywords: migration; New Deal; discrete choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J10 N32 O15 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2007-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-his, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp3060.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Migration Creation, Diversion, and Retention: New Deal Grants and Migration: 1935-1940 (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp3060

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().