Similar Search Results

Betting on Secession : Quantifying Political Events Surrounding Slavery and the Civil War

Calomiris, Charles W. - 2013

Abraham Lincoln's election produced Southern secession, Civil War, and abolition. Using a new database of slave sales from New Orleans, we examine the connections between political news and the prices of slaves for 1856-1861. We find that slave prices declined by roughly a third from their 1860...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013073191

Ruggedness : The Blessing of Bad Geography in Africa

Nunn, Nathan - 2009

There is controversy about whether geography matters mainly because of its contemporaneous impact on economic outcomes or because of its interaction with historical events. Looking at terrain ruggedness, we are able to estimate the importance of these two channels. Because rugged terrain hinders...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013160340

The Economics of African American Slavery : The Cliometrics Debate

Sutch, Richard C. - 2018

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/10012908822

The Intergenerational Effects of a Large Wealth Shock : White Southerners after the Civil War

Ager, Philipp - 2019

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/10012889495

The Social Implications of Sugar : Living Costs, Real Incomes and Inequality in Jamaica C1774

Burnard, Trevor - 2017

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/10012946034

The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades

Nunn, Nathan - 2010

Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa's slave trades....

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012759868

Health, Human Capital, and African American Migration Before 1910

Logan, Trevon - 2008

This is the first paper to document the effect of health on the migration propensities of African Americans in the American past. Using both IPUMS and the Colored Troops Sample of the Civil War Union Army Data, I estimate the effects of literacy and health on the migration propensities of...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012771802

Start-Up Nation? Slave Wealth and Entrepreneurship in Civil War Maryland

González, Felipe - 2016

Slave property rights yielded a source of collateral as well as a coerced labor force. Using data from Dun and Bradstreet linked to the 1860 census and slave schedules in Maryland, we find that slaveowners were more likely to start businesses prior to the uncompensated 1864 emancipation, even...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012985586

Fluctuations in a Dreadful Childhood : Synthetic Longitudinal Height Data, Relative Prices and Weather in the Short-Term Health of American Slaves

Steckel, Richard H. - 2021

For over a quarter century anthropometric historians have struggled to identify and measure the numerous factors that affect adult stature, which depends upon diet, disease and physical activity from conception to maturity. I simplify this complex problem by assessing nutritional status in a...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013219313

". . . And Six Hundred Thousand Men Were Dead."

Grossman, Herschel I. - 2021

proximately concerned the geographical expansion of slavery, but ultimately bore on the existence of the institution of slavery … itself. This paper asks why in 1861 after seventy years of artful compromises over slavery civil conflict became unavoidable … historical analysis the paper concludes that in the years leading up to 1861 the outcome of the dispute over slavery had become …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013235263