Essays on immigration, labour markets, and political behaviour

Thesis

This thesis is composed of three self-contained empirical chapters that tackle the labour market implications from COVID-19, and the political and trade implications from recent immigration, in the Brazilian context. The first chapter presents a short and medium term analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Brazilian labour markets. I find that informal workers, females, youth, and workers in small firms are the ones most adversely impacted in the short term. In the medium term, I show that there seems to be a lingering negative effect on women’s employment and wages, while informal workers seem to recover much faster than their formal peers. I further study the role of the government response in mitigating the shock of the pandemic, and the distributional impacts under different counterfactual targeting scenarios of the generous but temporary cash transfer program, Auxílio Emergencial. I find that the Auxílio Emergencial transfers more than offset the labour income losses for the bottom four deciles, such that inequality and headcount poverty ratio decreased relative to the pre-COVID baselines. The second chapter explores the impact of international immigration flows, exploiting the spatial variation across Brazilian municipalities from 2010 to 2017. I estimate the correlation between immigration and trade using a rich set of fixed effects, motivated by an augmented gravity model. I then provide a causal estimate of the impact using a Bartik shift-share instrumental variable approach. I find evidence of a pro-trade creation effect, particularly on differentiated imports, at the intensive and extensive product levels. I document that this impact differs depending on certain characteristics of the immigrants’ country of origin. The third paper analyses the impacts of the Haitian immigration on the voting outcomes and electoral participation of citizens in Brazil’s 2018 Presidential elections. I exploit this quasinatural experiment, and I use a variation on the shift-share instrument to arrive to a causal impact. I find that the presence of Haitian immigrants led to an overall average decrease in political participation across different education groups and an increase in vote shares towards right-wing parties. I analyse potential channels through which immigrants influence voting behaviour. While I rule out the mechanisms of natives’ fear over public resources, natives’ flight (voting with their feet), and changes in candidate composition, I present evidence that suggests that the change in voter behaviour is happening through cultural and economic mechanisms.

Authors: Al Masri, D

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-mjrd7mg6o
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English