Conference Agenda

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 a continuous 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. Event-study estimates show that these adjustments emerge around four years after the onset of the refugee inflow. We further document increases in agricultural GDP and production value, with persistently low agricultural wages playing a key role in facilitating this reallocation. These findings underscore the importance of policies that account for medium-run agricultural adjustment when designing refugee integration and agricultural development strategies in host countries.