NANCY Seminar – Berk ÖKTEM (Université Paris-Saclay)

Event details :

Title: Agricultural adaptation to labor-supply shocks: Insights from the Syrian refugee inflow in Turkey

Abstract: This paper examines how farmers adjust crop choices in response to a large and persistent increase in agricultural labor supply. We exploit the inflow of Syrian refugees into Turkey as a natural experiment that generated substantial and spatially heterogeneous variation in labor availability across provinces. Using administrative data on crop areas, production, and prices, combined with a distance-based instrumental variables strategy and difference-in-differences framework, we identify the causal effect of refugee inflows on agricultural outcomes. We find that greater refugee exposure leads to a gradual reallocation of land from cereals toward more labor-intensive fruits: a one percentage point increase in the refugee share raises the fruit share of total agricultural area by 0.32 percentage points per year. We further document increases in agricultural GDP and production value, and show that declining agricultural wages constitute a key mechanism through which refugee inflows facilitate reallocation toward labor-intensive crops. These crop reallocations are concentrated in provinces with more rugged terrain, where cereal production is less amenable to mechanization, highlighting the role of geographic constraints in shaping agricultural adjustment. These findings underscore the importance of policies that account for agricultural adjustment when designing refugee integration and agricultural development strategies in host countries.