Public unemployment relief and health during the great depression

ABSTRACT This paper uses newly collected data on county-level unemployment relief recipiency in 1933 with an OLS with fixed effects and a cross-sectional border-county research design, to examine the correlation between Depression-era public assistance and contemporaneous mortality. The paper finds that in counties where the government tended to support more unemployed families, mortality was lower, particularly for white families. Overall, the unemployment relief program accounted for around 2.5 percentage points of the mortality decline. This cross-sectional finding, is robust to a range of specifications, including an instrument variable design. The largest mortality reductions came from drops in communicable and infectious diseases.