Estimating effects of Haitian immigration on the Brazilian labor market

Abstract

This article aims to study the effects of the recent Haitian immigration to Brazil on labor market outcomes of natives such as mean wage and net formal admissions, where the municipalities are the units of analysis. Due to its inherent natural experiment characteristic, the identification strategy for the event is a comparative interrupted time series design, where the comparison group is obtained with a nearest-neighbor matching using a propensity score procedure. We used mainly data from formal labor registries provided by the Brazilian Ministry of Labor, also combined with IBGE’s sources to obtain the covariates for the propensity score estimation. After controlling the bias, we find no evidence that the Haitian immigration had an impact (either positive or negative) in the labor market outcomes of natives. The article is part of FGV/DAPP’s project called "An assessment of the potential impacts of the new migration flows in Brazil".