Unexpected Harvest: A Study of Californian Agricultural Wages after the IRCA

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was supposed to encourage a smaller, legal agricultural workforce. However, it actually led to a larger labor force, increased by new immigrant SAWs and unabated illegal immigration. Previous papers have failed to econometrically identify the drop in wages and increase in labor supply reported by farmers and workers, leading to a discrepancy between the economic literature and other fields’ literatures on the IRCA. Using a linear spline approach between two regions in California, I find that employment of agricultural workers in the SAW-heavy Los Angeles regions increased relative to that in the North Coast region due to a relative increase in farm labor contractor employment, suggesting an increase in labor supply caused by the IRCA. I also use difference-in-differencein-differences equations to show that wages decreased post-IRCA, particularly for laborintensive industries and for Mexican male immigrants

Type of resource	text
Date created	May 2015

Author	Kohn, Emily
Primary advisor	Abramitzky, Ran
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, Department of Economics

Subject	Stanford Department of Economics
Subject	Immigration Reform and Control Act
Subject	California agriculture
Subject	undocumented immigration
Subject	SAWs
Subject	Los Angeles
Subject	labor supply increase
Genre	Thesis

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/jd075wn7993

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Preferred Citation: Kohn, Emily. (2015). Unexpected Harvest: A Study of Californian Agricultural Wages after the IRCA. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/jd075wn7993

Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses

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