How the 1942 Japanese Exclusion Impacted U.S. Agriculture

Peter Lin and Giovanni Peri

No 33971, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Japanese American farmers represented a significant share of agriculture-specific human capital on the U.S. West Coast in 1940. In 1942, the U.S. forcibly relocated them to internment camps, and most never returned to farming. Using a triple-difference design on county panel data, we find that by 1960, counties in the exclusion zone experienced 12 percent lower farmvalue growth per percentage point of Japanese farm workers excluded, relative to non-exclusion counties. Value per farm, high-value crop sales, mechanization, and farm wages also declined. The pattern is consistent with Japanese farmers representing hard-to-replace human capital, not replaceable labor.

JEL-codes: N42 N52 O15 Q15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-his and nep-ure
Note: DAE LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33971.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33971

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33971
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().