I am grateful to Charles Calomiris, Susan Carter, Stanley Engerman, Thomas Ferguson, Lou Galambos, Helen Hunter, and Mary MacKinnon for their helpful comments.Google Scholar

¹ Baily, Martin, “The Labor Market in the 1930s,” in Tobin, James, ed., Macroeconomics, Prices and Quantities: Essays in Honor of Arthur Okun (Washington, DC, 1983).Google Scholar

² Exceptions are Bernanke, Ben, “Employment, Hours, and Earnings in the Great Depression: An Analysis of Eight Manufacturing Industries,” American Economic Review, 76 (03 1986), pp. 82–109;Google Scholarand Wallis, John Joseph, “Employment in the Great Depression: New Data and Hypotheses,” Explorations in Economic Historiy, 26 (01 1989), pp. 45–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ Palmer, Gladys, Employment and Unemployment in Philadelphia in 1936 and 1937 (Philadelphia, 1938).Google Scholar

⁴ U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of the Population. 1940: Public Use Microdata Sample (Washington, DC, 1983). The 1940 census sample is arranged into 20 subfiles, each a random sample of the population. My analysis is based on the first subfile.Google Scholar

⁵ Darby, Michael, “Three and a Half Million U.S. Employees Have Been Mislaid: Or, an Explanation of Unemployment, 1934–1941,” Journal of Political Economy, 84 (02 1976), pp. 1–16);CrossRefGoogle Scholarsee also Kesselman, J. and Savin, N. E., “Three and a Half Million Workers Never Were Lost,” Economic Inquiry, 16 (04 1978), pp. 176–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ The underrepresentation of relief jobs in the Northeast appears to undercut the WPA's belief that the distribution of relief jobs matched the distribution of population; see Margo, Robert A., “Interwar Unemployment in the United States: Evidence from the 1940 Census Sample,” in Eichengreen, B. and Hatton, T., Interwar Unemploymern in International Perspective (Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1988), p. 350.Google Scholar

⁷ U.S. Federal Works Agency, Final Report of the WPA Program, 1935–1943 (Washington, DC, 1946), p. 41.Google Scholar

⁸ Wallis, “Employment in the Great Depression,” pp. 65–66.Google Scholar

⁹ Baily, “The Labor Market,” p. 53.Google Scholar

¹⁰ It is possible that the long-term unemployed on work relief differed from the nonrelief long-term unemployed in unobservable ways that would have made them less employable had (marginal) improvements in aggregate demand occurred. In this case, the WPA would not have had a causal effect on reemployment probabilities. I am grateful to Charlie Calomiris for this point.Google Scholar

¹¹ Margo, “Interwar Unemployment,” p. 345.Google Scholar

¹² U.S. Federal Works Agency, Final Report, p. 32.Google Scholar

¹³ Turnover statistics in manufacturing suggest that the average duration of new jobs created in the 1930s was very short by historical standards; see Baily, “The Labor Market,” pp. 28–31, 48.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Quoted in Bakke, E. W., The Unemployed Worker (New Haven, 1940), pp. 421–22.Google Scholar

¹⁵ U.S. Federal Works Agency, Final Report, p. 32.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Darby, Michael, “Three and a Half Million U.S. Employees Have Been Mislaid: Or, an Explanation of Unemployment, 1934–1941,” Journal of Political Economy, 84 (02 1976), pp. 41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁷ For a similar conclusion, see Baily, “The Labor Market,” p. 53.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Keyssar, Alexander, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA, 1986);Google Scholarand Margo, Robert A., “The Incidence and Duration of Unemployment: Some Long-Term Comparisons,” Economics Letters, 32 (01 1990), pp. 217–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁹ Jacoby, Sanford M., Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900–1945 (New York, 1985).Google Scholar

²⁰ Jensen, Richard, “The Causes and Cures of Unemployment in the Great Depression,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 19 (Spring 1989), pp. 553–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar