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Ariell Zimran |
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with David Escamilla-Guerrero and Andrea Papadia NBER Working Paper 32083, IZA Discussion Paper 16741, and Oxford Economic and Social History Working Paper 211 Submitted We study the effects of immigration on Brazil's agricultural development during the Age of Mass Migration. We leverage the widely recognized value of historical perspective in immigration economics and Brazil's unique characteristics among major immigrant destinations of the period---a low-income country with a large agricultural sector and weak institutions---to shed light on the effect of immigration in heavily agricultural economies at an early stage of development. 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 and that the bulk of the effect was the product of more intense cultivation of land. Additionally, we find that it is unlikely that immigration's effect on agriculture slowed Brazil’s structural transformation. |