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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/10012459036
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Dimensions and Determinants of Early Childhood Health and Mortality Among American Slaves
Steckel, Richard H. - 1985
This paper relies on birth and death lists from plantation records to investigate the causes of low birth weight and poor health of young slave children. The sources of deprivation can be traced to the fetal period. The slave work routine was arduous overall and particularily intense during...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012477418
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Estimating Neonatal Mortality Rates from the Heights of Children : The Case of American Slaves
Steckel, Richard H. - 1985
development that is unobserved among poor populations of the twentieth century. Thus slavery may have created an unusual pattern …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012477452
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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/10012479651
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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/10012480849
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Manumission in Nineteenth Century Virginia
Bodenhorn, Howard - 2010
productive slaves faced more attractive labor market opportunities outside slavery, which elicited greater effort within slavery … in order to buy their way out of slavery. Further, this paper addresses three important and two emergent literatures: the … economics of slavery; the economics of stature; and the economics of complexion. The results reveal that height, complexion, and …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012462948
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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/10012463730
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The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa
Nunn, Nathan - 2009
We investigate the historical origins of mistrust within Africa. Combining contemporary household survey data with historic data on slave shipments, we show that individuals whose ancestors were heavily raided during the slave trade today exhibit less trust in neighbors, relatives, and their...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463864
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Preserving Slave Families for Profit : Traders' Incentives and Pricing in the New Orleans Slave Market
Calomiris, Charles - 2008
price discounts for families which cannot be explained by scale effects, childcare costs, legal restrictions, or transport …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012464365
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Biological Innovation and Productivity Growth in the Antebellum Cotton Economy
Olmstead, Alan L. - 2008
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