Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/295764 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 16741
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
The effects of immigration are reasonably well understood in developed countries, but they are far more poorly understood in developing ones despite the importance of these countries as immigrant destinations. We address this shortcoming by studying the effects of immigration to Brazil during the Age of Mass Migration on its agricultural sector in 1920. This context benefits from the widely recognized value of historical perspective in studies of the effects of immigration. But unlike studies that focus on the United States to understand the effects of migration from poor to rich countries, our context is informative of developing countries' experience because Brazil in this period was unique among major migrant destinations as a low-income country with a large agricultural sector and weak institutions. Instrumenting for a municipality's immigrant share using the interaction of aggregate immigrant inflows and the expansion of Brazil's railway network, we find that a greater immigrant share in a municipality led to an increase in farm values. We show that the bulk of the effect of immigration can be explained by more intense cultivation of land, which we attribute to temporary immigrants exerting greater labor effort than natives. Finally, we find that it is unlikely that immigration's effect on agriculture slowed Brazil's structural transformation.
Subjects: 
immigration
developing countries
effects of immigration
age of mass migration
Brazil
agriculture
JEL: 
F22
J61
N36
N56
O13
O15
Q15
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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