Date of Submission
Fall 2017
Academic Programs and Concentrations
Economics; Political Studies
Project Advisor 1
Martin Martell
Abstract/Artist's Statement
Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt created The New York State Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA) in response to the Great Depression. Operating from 1931-37, this state-level jobs-and-income style policy featured comprehensive in-kind assistance, “home relief,” and emergency unemployment relief, “work relief.” Though the program is fascinating just in this respect, it has been systematically overshadowed by the alphabet soup of New Deal era relief policies. We revisit the TERA to shed light on what it offered to the people of NY and, overall, what it offered to the economy. We find significant evidence that the program stabilized the State economy by reducing unemployment and generating private sector job creation through the multiplier-accelerator effect.
Open Access Agreement
Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Gunn, Hasani J., "The Political Economy of State-level Emergency Unemployment Relief: The Case of the New York TERA, 1931-37" (2017). Senior Projects Fall 2017. 25.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_f2017/25
This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.
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