IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fednrp/9508.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Federal grants during the eighties

Author

Listed:
  • Ronnie Lowenstein

Abstract

Federal grants policy changed significantly during the eighties. Grants to states and localities decreased as a share of GDP, the first sustained decline in aid since the forties. Restrictions on the use of federal funds were eased with the conversion of categorical matching aid programs into unconditional block grants. At the same time, aid to individuals rose at the expense of other major grants categories. Taken together, these changes in federal grants tended to decrease state and local government investment in physical and human capital. I estimate that the decline in federal grants for physical capital investment curbed average annual growth of state and local capital (as a share of GDP) by roughly 0.5 percentage points during the eighties, and slowed the growth of output by as much as 0.7 percentage points over the decade. Similarly, cuts in grants for job training decreased GDP growth by as much as 0.4 percentage points over the same period.

Suggested Citation

  • Ronnie Lowenstein, 1995. "Federal grants during the eighties," Research Paper 9508, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
  • Handle: RePEc:fip:fednrp:9508
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/research_papers/9508.html
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/research_papers/9508.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Revenue sharing; Capital investments;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fednrp:9508. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Gabriella Bucciarelli (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbnyus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.