This is a replication study of Cook et al.(2023), a paper that investigates the determinants of access to nondiscriminatory public accommodations for African-Americans before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They utilize the Negro Motorist Green Books and World War II casualty data to examine the...

The traditional historical narrative claims that White women were rarely involved in market transactions for enslaved people in the antebellum United States. Using transaction records, notary statements, and runaway advertisements, we provide the first quantitative estimates of the extent of...

We re-characterize American slavery as inefficient, whereby emancipation generated substantial aggregate economic gains. Coercive labor markets were severely distorted, with the social marginal cost of labor substantially above its marginal benefit. Production during enslavement came at immense...