The Effects of Immigration in a Developing Country: Brazil in the Age of Mass Migration
We study the effects of immigration in Brazil during the Age of Mass Migration, focusing on the country's agricultural sector in 1920. This context combines the widely recognized value of historical perspective in studies of the effects of immigration with Brazil's unique position among major immigrant destinations of the period as a low-income country with a large agricultural sector and weak institutions to shed light on the effect of immigration in countries 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. Finally, we find that it is unlikely that immigration's effect on agriculture slowed Brazil's structural transformation.
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