In an effort to boost hiring and job creation and to invest in a variety of domestic infrastructure programs, Congress passed and the president signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), commonly known as the economic stimulus package, in 2009. ARRA represented one of the largest peacetime fiscal stimulus packages in American history. But little is known about the ways in which organizations and workers responded to the incentives created by the bill.
To address the lack of knowledge about ARRA funding, we surveyed hundreds of firms, non-profits, and local governments that received ARRA funding. We collected over 1,300 anonymous, voluntary responses from managers and employees that allow us to better understand what happened at the organizations that received contracts funded by ARRA spending. This bottom-up study of ARRA is the first of its kind. We hope that others, especially government agencies, will build upon this on-the-ground analysis.
The survey asked a number of questions critical to analyzing the effectiveness of ARRA: Were new workers mostly hired from the unemployment lines or did they get "poached" or "raided" from other organizations? Did workers "game" the unemployment insurance system by waiting until benefits ran out before taking a job? Did Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws force organizations to pay above market wages to new hires?
The quantitative survey results here complement our interview-based results in a companion paper (Jones and Rothschild, 2011) and suggest a number of interesting results, some expected and others surprising:
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