The institution of slavery displays a puzzling historical pattern: it is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development, in horticultural societies, and less frequently among hunter-gatherers and societies at more advanced agrarian stages. We explain this rise-and- fall pattern...

In addition to supervision costs, the labor cost of an enterprise (plantation) in the system of slavery consists of the cost of acquiring the slaves and the subsistence compensation given out to the slaves. In this paper, we leave aside the issue of supervision costs previously taken up in the...

Using unpublished data contained in samples from the manuscripts of the 1870 and 1880 censuses of manufactures¾the earliest comprehensive estimates available¾ this study examines the extent and correlates of part-year manufacturing during the late 19th century. While the typical manufacturing...

Early states like China, India, Italy and Greece have been experiencing more rapid economic growth in recent decades than have later-comers to agriculture and statehood like New Guinea, the Congo, and Uruguay. We show that more rapid growth by early starters has been the norm in economic...

The distributive politics literature following Weingast (1979) predicts majoritarian redistribution within countries governed by strong party systems. This prediction is tested using evidence from Canadian job creation grant programs active during the mid-1990s. Results provide strong evidence...

In this paper, we focus on and examine the empirical evidence of non- linearity in aggregate Canadian unemployment. Contrary to the conclusion reached in Murray et al. (1993), and using a corrected for bias simple non-parametric test (SNT), we reject the null hypothesis of a linear structure for...