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.
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.
How increased labor supply of immigrants affect firm performance and native labor market outcomes? While most of the migration literature focuses on native individual outcomes aggregated at some geographical level, hiring an immigrant is a firm-level decision that might change firm’s dynamics and might affect natives within firms or across firms operating in the same labor market. In this paper, we use a matched employer-employee dataset from 2000 to 2017 to analyse firm and native worker outcomes aggregated at the regional level. Our empirical strategy combines past settlements of immigrants and push factors (e.g. environmental disasters and political instability) at the country of origin, which are plausibly uncorrelated with local labor market outcomes in Brazil. We find evidence that immigration had a negative effect on the number of firms hiring formally in a region and also on native labor market outcomes (decrease in wages and increase in layoffs). We shed light on the mechanisms by analyzing establishment-level and worker-level outcomes within and across firms. We find evidence contrary to within-establishment adjustment hypotheses.
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).