Abstract
Legal access to land in Brazil has been a key political issue for the past century. The concentration of land in large estates that are often unproductive is argued to be a factor in the rural population’s low social mobility and inequality. However, restricted land access in Brazil has its roots in colonial times when large plots of land were distributed from 1530-1822 through land grants called sesmarias. Through a novel georeferenced dataset on the location of the grants in eight Brazilian states, I estimate the long-term effects of the grants on Brazil’s land distribution. Using propensity score matching, an instrumental variable, and exploiting colonial policy variation on where the grants could be assigned, I find consistent positive effects of land concentration in 1995 for municipalities with a colonial land grant. The estimates vary between 2 to 22 percentage points increase in the share of agricultural land in properties of over 2,000ha, depending on the methodology and subregion of Brazil. Land grants are also associated with increased land conflicts and urbanization in modern Brazil.