Showing 1 - 10 of 3,610
Why does inequality vary across societies? We advance the hypothesis that in a market economy, where earning differentials reflect variations in productive traits, a significant component of the differences in income inequality across societies can be attributed to variation in societal...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014337813
We re-characterize American slavery as inefficient, whereby emancipation generated substantial aggregate economic gains …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014421183
affect its dominant values, we examine the case of the movement for the abolition of slavery in the late 18th and early 19th … values and weak economic interest in the status quo to mobilize for change. Using data on anti-slavery petitions, membership … parliamentary speeches to show that industrialists were relatively less reliant on income from slavery and were characterized by a …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014372465
Based on data from several samples of probate inventories we construct and analyze a time series of slave prices for South Carolina from 1722 to 1809. These estimates reveal that prices fluctuated without trend prior to the 1760s and then began to rise rapidly, more than doubling by the early...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012471200
Using data from samples of probate inventories we construct a series of slave prices for Low Country South Carolina and Georgia covering the period 1722-1815. Using these data we examine variations in slave prices by age and sex, as well as geographic variations between and within the two...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012471326
This paper relies on birth and death lists from plantation records to investigate the causes of low birth weight and poor health of young slave children. The sources of deprivation can be traced to the fetal period. The slave work routine was arduous overall and particularily intense during...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012477418
development that is unobserved among poor populations of the twentieth century. Thus slavery may have created an unusual pattern …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012477452
The nullification of slave wealth after the U.S. Civil War (1861-65) was one of the largest episodes of wealth compressions in history. We document that white Southern households holding more slave assets in 1860 lost substantially more wealth by 1870, relative to households that had been...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012479651
This working paper explores the significant contributions to the history of African-American slavery made by the … explicit use of economic theory and quantitative methods. American slavery of the late antebellum period [1840-1860] was one of …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012480849
This paper provides the first quantitative assessment of Jamaican standards of living and income inequality around 1774. To this purpose we compute welfare ratios for a range of occupations and build a social table. We find that the slave colony had extremely high living costs, which rose...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453817