Economic Determinants of Land Invasions

Abstract

This study estimates the effect of economic conditions on redistributive conflict. We examine land invasions in Brazil using a panel data set with over 50,000 municipality-year observations. Adverse economic shocks, instrumented by rainfall, cause the rural poor to invade and occupy large landholdings. This effect exhibits substantial heterogeneity by land inequality and land tenure systems, but not by other observable variables. In highly unequal municipalities, negative income shocks cause twice as many land invasions as in municipalities with average land inequality. Cross-sectional estimates using fine within-region variation also suggest the importance of land inequality in explaining redistributive conflict. © 2010 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

What Do We Learn from the Weather? The New Climate-Economy Literature

“…Hidalgo et al (2010) Similarly, Dell (2012) finds that municipalities in Mexico that experienced more severe drought in the early twentieth century were more likely to have insurgency during the Mexican Revolution than nearby municipalities with less severe drought.…”

“…Examples include Paxson (1992), which uses negative rainfall shocks to test for the permanent income hypothesis and shows impacts of rainfall on rural incomes; Jayachandran (2006), which focuses on the determinants of labor supply elasticities and shows that more rainfall in Indian districts leads to higher crop yields and higher agricultural wages; Yang and Choi (2007), which uses rainfall shocks to test for international remittances as insurance and shows impacts of rainfall on rural incomes in the Philippines; and Hidalgo et al (2010), who, in their study of land invasions, estimate that rainfall deviations in Brazil lower agricultural incomes, with a one standard deviation change in rainfall reducing income by around 4 percent.…”

External Shocks, Internal Shots: The Geography of Civil Conflicts

“…More precisely, they show that positive commodity price shocks decreases the likelihood of conflicts in the case of coffee (a labor-intensive commodity) but raises the probability of conflict for oil (a capital intensive commodity). Following Miguel et al (2004), Hidalgo et al (2010) use data on Brazilian municipalities and find that favorable economic shocks, instrumented by rainfall 3 , affect positively the number of land invasions within municipalities. This is also the case for Bohlken and Sergenti (2010) in the case of Hindu-Muslim riots in India.…”

Income Opportunities and Sea Piracy in Indonesia: Evidence from Satellite Data

“…These include witch killings in Tanzania (Miguel 2005), violent and property crime in nineteenth century Germany (Mehlum, Miguel, and Torvik 2006), peasant revolts in China (Jia 2014), occupation of landholdings in Brazil (Hidalgo et al 2010), as well as Hindu-Muslim riots (Bohlken and Sergenti 2010), dowry deaths (Sekhri and Storeygard 2014), and crime (Iyer and Topalova 2014) in India. Higher temperatures have also been linked with both civil war (Burke et al 2009) and crime (Jacob, Lefgren, and Moretti 2007).…”