Proposed Objectives of the Project:
This project aims to examine the consequences of the negative trend in agricultural labor supply caused by declining rates of Mexican migration to the United States.

Summary of Results:
The project has generated three key findings resulting from the decline in immigration from Mexico over the past twenty years. First, Mexican immigrants have become less internally mobile in response to local labor market conditions. Second, the farm sector has made up labor shortfalls using contract labor in the short run, and substituting to more capital-intensive practices in the long run. Third, the H2A visa program has emerged as another mechanism to compensate for short-term labor shortfalls in recent years.

Specific Objectives:
Chilean fruit production grew by 12% per year from 1997-2007, and the country is currently one of the world's leading fruit exporters. This project evaluates the role that Chilean agricultural land redistribution in the 1960's and 1970's played in the subsequent adoption of fruit production.

Summary of Results:
In the 1960's and early 1970's, progressive land redistribution efforts in Chile reassigned ownership of roughly 13 percent of the nation's agricultural land. Municipality-level analysis indicates that redistribution was associated with greater area devoted to vineyards and less to forestry by 1997, suggesting that land reform increased the intensity of fruit cultivation. These results were derived using digitized records of plots redistributed during land reform. Comparable data on
non-reform plots exists in undigitized format, and digitizing these records provides a path forward for future research that evaluates the effect of land redistribution at a more granular level.