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Title: More Hands, More Power? The Impact of Immigration on Farming and Technology Choices in US Agriculture in Early 20th Century
Citation Type: Conference Paper
Publication Year: 2010
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Abstract: How do technological progress and the adoption of new technology respond to the availabilityof complementary factors or the price of such factors? This paper attempts to answerthis question in the context of US agriculture in the first half of the twentieth century andits response to immigration flows at the local level. Using the past prevalence of immigrantsas an instrument for the location choice of waves of immigration between 1900 and 1940, thepaper estimates the impact of an increase in the number of immigrant farmers on measuresof capital and technology adoption at the county and state level using data from the Censusof Agriculture. It finds that larger immigrant flows led to slower adoption of labor-savingtechnologies, as proxied by various sources of draft power, and a shift towards more laborintensivecrops. At the same time, an increase in the number of immigrants in a particularcounty led that countys farms to be less capital intensive: a one percent increase in the numberof immigrant farmers translated into a fall in the capital to labor ratio in that county ofabout 0.2 percent. This holds even when one controls for the potential scale effects, changes inthe crop mixes and controls for state-level variations over time. A fall of similar magnitude isobserved for the capital to output ratio but in this case, it seems to be driven by the changes inthe crops planted. Overall, these results seem to indicate that, although technology adoptionresponded to the labor influx of capital, it was unable to entirely absorb the change caused byimmigration into local agricultural markets.
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Authors: Lafortune, Jeanne; Tessada, Jos; Gonzlez, Carolina
Conference Name: Population Association of America
Publisher Location: Dallas, TX
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Migration and Immigration, Other
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