Showing 1 - 10 of 28
We re-characterize American slavery as inefficient, whereby emancipation generated substantial aggregate economic gains …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014421183
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
-of-Africa Migration. The roots of income inequality within the US population provide supporting evidence for the hypothesis. It suggests …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014337813
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
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
The Cliometrics literature on slave efficiency has generally focused on static questions. We take a decidedly more dynamic approach. Drawing on the records of 142 plantations with 509 crops years, we show that the average daily cotton picking rate increased about four-fold between 1801 and 1862....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012464504
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 …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012464610
By the end of the Civil War, 186,017 black men had fought for the Union Army and roughly three-quarters of these men were former slaves. Because most of the black soldiers who served were illiterate farm workers, the war exposed them to a much broader world. The war experience of these men...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012467674
How much do sins visited upon one generation harm that generation's future sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters? I study this question by comparing outcomes for former slaves and their children and grandchildren to outcomes for free blacks (pre-1865), and their children and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012469482
We document the intergenerational mobility of black and white American men from 1880 through 2000 by building new datasets to study the late 19th and early 20th century and combining them with modern data to cover the mid- to late 20th century. We find large disparities in intergenerational...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012455286