Can rural credit raise productivity without pushing the agricultural frontier into tropical forests? We examine this trade-off in Brazil, home to the largest remaining tropical forest and the world’s second-largest food exporter. Using administrative data on agricultural machinery credit, we identify these effects through a shift-share design leveraging the shock-level exogeneity of variation in bank supply. A 1% increase in credit raises crop production by 0.13% and productivity by 0.16%, with no detectable overall effect on forest cover. Gains concentrate where land is scarce and labor abundant; conversely, open-frontier municipalities exhibit weaker productivity effects and suggestive forest loss.
with Francisco Costa
How can adverse formal-sector effects of immigration at the regional level coexist with favorable outcomes inside the establishments that hire immigrants? We use matched employer-employee data from Brazil for 2000 to 2017 to estimate regional effects and characterize establishment-level patterns. We instrument regional immigrant exposure with a shift-share design that combines past immigrant settlements with country-of-origin inflows predicted by push factors such as environmental disasters and political instability. Greater exposure reduces the number of establishments hiring formally, lowers native formal wages, and increases native layoffs. Yet establishments employ more native workers and pay slightly higher native earnings after their first immigrant hire. These establishment-level estimates are descriptive because immigrant hiring is endogenous. The contrast shows that outcomes within immigrant-hiring establishments do not capture immigration’s full incidence across a local labor market, consistent with adjustment across establishments or between formal and informal employment.
There is evidence that particular types of immigration induce electoral shifts to the right-wing. With that in mind, we ask: is this purely a short run effect or is there persistence or attenuation through time? Also, to what extent is the effect mediated by changes in the living conditions of natives? This paper aims to unpack the underlying economic mechanisms through which low-skilled immigration shifted votes towards republicans in the United States between 1992 and 2016. Building upon a dynamic shift-share strategy for identification, we are able to disentangle between short and longer-term adjustment dynamics. We show that unemployment among low-skilled natives and local welfare expenditure per capita increase in the short run as a result of low-skilled immigration, but those effects fade through time, while voting is shifted towards republicans in the short run, but does not attenuate. We then use causal mediation analysis to measure the joint contribution of these channels to explain changes in voting. We estimate this explanation potential to be 60% in the short run. In the medium run, if only economic channels were at play, we would expect attenuation in voting shifts to be higher, suggesting that there are possibly other non-economic factors generating persistence in the right-wing shift.
Expatriados, imigrantes e refugiados no Brasil: trajetórias e estratégias de integração econômica e social. [link] Mosaico, v. 8, n.13 (Imigração e Identidades), p. 161-179, 2017 (joint with Marco Ruediger, Margareth da Luz, Maria Isabel Couto, Janaina Fernandes, Bárbara Barbosa and Marcelo Rotenberg).