Migration, selection and income differentials in northern Brazil in 2010

Abstract

There is an ample amount of migratory studies of  Brazil, however, the North region was left aside in most of these studies. We propose a specific study on the migration process that occurs in northern Brazil. It aims to: i) test the validity of positive selectivity of migrants in the region; and, ii) understand the effect of migration time in income differentials between migrants and non-migrants in this region. To perform the proposed analysis will be used microdata from the Demographic Census of 2010 Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics - IBGE, considering the sample individuals who lived in the period of research, in one of the states of the North. The migrant selectivity test will use the estimation method in two stages proposed by Heckman (1979). The results showed that the migrant population of the northern region, seen in its entirety, does not form a group positively selected. However, this was not the case observed for the population of more recent migrants (who migrated less than 5 years) in this group, there was a difference of positive income in relation to other people. However, this yield spread was not sustained for older migrants. Therefore, what was observed is that every year a migrant's stay in the destination location, your income decreases by around 0.5%, becoming increasingly close to the income of a non-migrant.