Immigrant Workers and Farm Performance: Evidence from Matched Employer-Employee Data

In many developed countries, the agricultural sector has experienced a significant inflow of immigrants. At the same time, agriculture is still in a process of structural transformation, resulting in fewer but larger and presumably more efficient farms. We exploit matched employer-employee data for Danish farms in 1980--2008 to analyze the micro-level relationship between these two developments. Farms employing immigrants tend to be both larger than and no less productive than other farms. Furthermore, an increased use of immigrants is associated with an improvement in job creation and revenue, which at least partially seems to reflect a causal effect of immigrants. Copyright 2013, Oxford University Press.