“You would think that if the stimulus money was actually spent to create jobs, there would be more stimulus money spent in high unemployment states,” said Veronique de Rugy, a scholar at the Mercatus Center who produced the analysis. “But we don’t find any correlation.” The Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia is one of the nation’s most respected economic and regulatory think tanks and has a Nobel prize-winning economist on staff. The econometric analysis was done using data provided by Recovery.gov — the government website devoted to tracking the stimulus data — as well as a host of other government databases. Additionally, Mercatus found that stimulus funds were not disbursed with any special regard for low-income Americans. “We find no correlation between economic indicators and stimulus funding. Preliminary results find no statistically significant effect of unemployment, median income or mean income on stimulus funds allocation,” said the report.