The maps below provide an initial look at which states benefited most from federal aid through the CARES Act, the FFCRA, the RRA and the ARPA. A systematic pattern is that low-population states appear repeatedly among the top quintiles of recipients (in $ per capita)
3/16 pic.twitter.com/ofjJRtvFQv— Jeffrey P. Clemens (@jeffreypclemens) June 1, 2021
How have the roughly $900 billion of COVID-19 relief aid to states and localities over the past 14 months been distributed to those governments? A new paper by economists Jeffrey Clemens and Stan Veuger attempts to answer this question. They document that states with relatively low populations received larger amounts of per capita aid. Clemens and Veuger (my AEI colleague) conclude that federal funding is strongly predicted by small states’ degree of over-representation in Congress.
Here’s their paper’s abstract:
COVID-19 relief legislation offers a unique setting to study how political representation shapes the distribution of federal assistance to state and local governments. We provide evidence of a substantial small-state bias: an additional Senator or Representative per million residents predicts an additional $670 dollars in aid per capita across the four relief packages. Alignment with the Democratic party predicts increases in states’ allocations through legislation designed after the January 2021 political transition. This benefit of partisan alignment operates through the American Rescue Plan Act’s sheer size, as well as the formulas through which it distributed transportation and general relief funds.