Berk Öktem (RITM-Université Paris-Saclay) will present his paper “Agricultural adaptation to labor-supply shocks: Insights from the Syrian refugee inflow in Turkey,” co-authored with Oussama Ben Atta (GATT).
Abstract: This paper studies how farmers adjust crop choices after a large and persistent increase in agricultural labor supply. We use the inflow of Syrian refugees into Turkey as a natural experiment that generated substantial and uneven changes in labor supply across provinces. Using administrative data on crop areas, production, and prices, we estimate the causal effect of refugee inflows on agricultural outcomes with two separate approaches: a distance-based instrumental variables strategy and a continuous difference-in-differences design. The results show a gradual reallocation of land away from cereals and toward more labor-intensive fruits: a one percentage point increase in the refugee share increases the fruit share of total agricultural area by 0.32 percentage points in the post-inflow period. Event-study estimates indicate that this adjustment starts about four years after the beginning of the inflow. We also find increases in agricultural GDP and production value, consistent with persistently low agricultural wages facilitating the shift toward labor-intensive crops. These crop reallocations are concentrated in more rugged provinces, where cereal production is harder to mechanize, highlighting how geographic constraints shape adjustment to labor-supply shocks. These findings underscore the importance of policies that account for agricultural adjustment when designing refugee integration and agricultural development strategies in host countries.
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