Internal migration and the spread of long-term impacts of historical immigration in Brazil
Presented by:
Eduardo Cenci
Practice Job Talk
Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Thursday, October 1, 2020
3:45 pm-5:15 pm
Online - Login with UW-Madison NetID to view link
If you do not have a UW-Madison NetID, you can contact the seminar organizer or consult the seminar email announcement.
Immigration shocks in the 1850–1960 period left long-lasting positive impacts in southern Brazil. Yet, little is known about how these benefits spread to other parts of the country in the following decades. We use a surname-based classification of ancestries to identify descendants of immigrants and investigate the spreading of gains from historical immigration in Brazil. We find that the concentration of descendants of historical immigrants in municipalities in northern and central Brazil is positively associated with several indicators of economic development today, in particular with higher wages. Leveraging individual-level information from linked employer-employee data in which we observe both the individual's wage and ancestry, we find a wage premium of approximately 10% for descendants and positive spillovers between ancestry groups. One additional percentage point in the concentration of descendants in a municipality corresponds to a wage increase of 1% to descendants and 2% for non-descendants. Our results agree with a model where descendants and non-descendants have complementary skills in the production function of the firms, particularly those in the agricultural sector.