working papers
Brasil sem imigrantes: estimativas de longo prazo baseadas em microdados (in Portuguese)
Este trabalho estima o efeito da imigração não-ibérica para o Brasil com base em microdados históricos e contemporâneos. A base histórica engloba mais 1,7 milhões de registros de imigrantes; já a contemporânea, parte de um banco de dados com mais 165 milhões registros administrativos. O cálculo do enumeramento dos imigrantes permite afirmar que Stolz Baten e Botelho (2013) subestimaram essa habilidade dos estrangeiros e, portanto, seu impacto no Brasil. Um algoritmo de classificação de sobrenomes categorizou a população brasileira contemporânea em grupos ancestrais. Em seguida, constroem-se então duas estimativas contrafatuais do que seria a renda per capita se nunca tivesse havido imigração não-ibérica. Um contrafatual decorre da regressão dessa renda pelos percentuais de cada grupo ancestral nos municípios. O outro, resulta das regressão de salários individuais sobre a ancestralidade de sobrenome de cada trabalhador. Os coeficientes obtidos em ambas são usados para estimar a renda per capita em um Brasil sem descendentes de imigrantes. Nesse caso, estimou-se que a renda per capita brasileira seria entre 12,6% e 17% menor do que a hoje observada.
O Encontro Entre Douglass North e Celso Furtado em 1961: visões alternativas sobre a economia nordestina (in Portuguese)
(with Mauro Boianovsky)
In June 1961 the American economist Douglass North visited Brazil for 3 weeks, for a mission organized by the US State Department and Instituto Brasileiro de Economia (IBRE-FGV). The goals of North’s Brazilian mission were to evaluate Sudene’s plans for the Northeast – which involved meeting Celso Furtado –, to give lectures on regional growth and assess the quality of economics courses in the country. This paper deals with the “meeting” between North and Furtado in the broad sense of the word, that is, not only the actual meeting of June 20 1961, but also the meeting of their respective ideas about how to develop the economy of the Northeast. It is based on new material formed by original documents of the “Douglass North Papers” collection held at Duke University Library.
(with Philipp Ehrl)
This paper estimates the long-term impact of immigration to Rio Grande do Sul/Brazil on contemporary wages. Based on a unique micro-data panel that includes the names of workers, we apply machine learning algorithms to classify surnames and infer each workers’ ancestry in order to calculate the inherited cultural diversity in the workforce by municipality. We address the endogeneity of cultural diversity by using three sets of instruments: distance to settlements created by the government for non Iberian immigrants between 1824-1918, share of street names with foreign surnames and share of foreigners in 1920. Our IV-estimations prove robust to human capital differences, institutions, geography, the spatial sorting of workers based on intrinsic abilities and the diffusion of knowledge through imports. The results clearly indicate that an increase in diversity – exclusively transmitted through the share of workers with non-Iberian ancestry – leads to a positive wage externality.
Colônias de Povoamento Versus Colônias de Exploração: de Heeren a Acemoglu
(aceito em Análise econômica)
The paper examines the evolution of the thesis which states that the type of colonization determines, or conditions, the future of societies. Adam Smith already presented this proposition and a typology of colonies. However, it were the German authors Heeren and Roscher, in the 19th century, who developed the thesis. These historians influenced the French orthodox economist Leroy-Beaulieu, who dealt with the issue in a work published in 1902. Clearly, Caio Prado Jr. was another promoter of the dichotomy “settlement colony versus extractive/exploitation colony” in Brazil rather than its creator. In the United States, the idea resurfaces in the works of Douglass North (1955 and 1959) and Richard Baldwin (1957). More recently, cliometricians as Engerman and Sokoloff (1997) developed the proposition without reference to the European authors. Finally, Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001 and 2002) introduced the thesis to a wider academic audience and offered econometric evidence. The present paper concludes with a discussion on the possible reasons for the success of the thesis and its recurring “discovery” by researchers.