by Patrick Appel
New research looks at the types of jobs that were created:
In our survey, just 42.1 percent of the workers hired at ARRA-receiving organizations after January 31, 2009, were unemployed at the time they were hired … More were hired directly from other organizations (47.3 percent of post-ARRA workers), while a handful came from school (6.5%) or from outside the labor force (4.1%)
Tyler Cowen thinks this "paper goes a long way toward explaining why fiscal stimulus usually doesn’t have such a great 'bang for the buck'":
Many of the created jobs involved hiring people back from retirement. You can tell a story about how hiring the already employed opened up other jobs for the unemployed, but it’s just that — a story. I don’t think it is what happened in most cases, rather firms ended up getting by with fewer workers.
The Dish 