 Internal Migration and Urban Wages in Brazil: 1980-2000Tiago Freire () ERSA conference papers from European Regional Science Association Abstract: It is generally accepted that migration will lead to an increase in income. However the question is how will income be distributed across individuals in society? If migrants have lower education levels, when compared to current urban workers, then the in ow of migrants will increase the skill wage gap in urban areas. Previous work on this topic has focused on international migration in developed countries. To the best of our knowledge this is the rst study to look at the impact of rural-urban migration on city wages. Our results contribute to the evaluation of regional policies, as recent research has found that regional policies can lead to an increase (or decrease) in the number of rural to urban migrants. We use data the Brazilian Census for 1980 to 2000 to estimate the elasticity of substitution between high and low skill workers. We instrument for the change in the ratio of high to low skill workers, with rural-urban migrants (driven by rainfall shocks in rural areas). Finally, in our simulations we show that migration can only explain 3% of the decrease in the wage gap between high and low skill workers, in Brazil, between 1991 and 2000. Date: 2011-09 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa11p384 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in ERSA conference papers from European Regional Science Association Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria. |
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