Does it pay to be a locale of political importance? Political business cycle theory predicts that the executive has an incentive to manipulate policy to increase the chances of their party remaining in office. In particular, core counties (those that vote for the current administration) have been shown to enjoy disproportionately higher federal spending. In this paper, we explore how this funding affects the well-being of an area by estimating the effect of presidential particularism on governmental transfers and (productive) income per-capita using county-level data from 1993 to 2012. We find that transfer payments tend to be higher and income lower in counties that vote for the current administration. These findings are robust across a wide number of specifications including fixed effects, first differences, a first differenced model with county-specific time trends, and a matching analysis. Moreover, results hold when examining the subset of counties that only voted for a single party throughout the entire sample where the treatment (whether the county voted for the current administration) is largely exogenous to the county in question.

成为具有政治重要性的场所是否值得？政治商业周期理论预测，行政部门有动机操纵政策以增加其政党继续执政的机会。特别是，核心县（那些投票给现任政府的县）已被证明享有不成比例的更高联邦支出。在本文中，我们通过使用 1993 年至 2012 年的县级数据估计总统特殊主义对政府转移支付和（生产性）人均收入的影响，探讨了这种资金如何影响一个地区的福祉。我们发现转移支付在投票给现任政府的县中，收入往往更高，收入更低。这些发现在广泛的规范中是稳健的，包括固定效应、一阶差分、具有县特定时间趋势的第一个差分模型和匹配分析。此外，在检查整个样本中仅投票给一个政党的县子集时，结果仍然成立，其中处理（该县是否投票给现任政府）在很大程度上对相关县来说是外生的。