We re-characterize American slavery as inefficient, whereby emancipation generated substantial aggregate economic gains …

We study how the prevailing internal organization of the family affected the initial design of pension systems. Our … theoretical framework predicts that, in society with weak family ties, pensions systems were introduced to act as a safety net … a historical classification of family ties, we show that in societies dominated by (weak ties) absolute nuclear families …

-of-Africa Migration. The roots of income inequality within the US population provide supporting evidence for the hypothesis. It suggests …

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 …

This is the first paper to document the effect of health on the migration propensities of African Americans in the … literacy and health on the migration propensities of African Americans from 1870 to 1910. I find that literacy and health … shocks were strong predictors of migration and the stock of health was not. There were differential selection propensities …

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 …