Showing 1 - 10 of 391
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
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 To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa's slave trades....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/10012465283
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
We assess how the African slave trade--which had enduring effects on social cohesion--continues to influence financial systems. After showing that the intensity with which people were enslaved and exported from Africa during the 1400 - 1900 period helps account for overall financial development,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453911
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/10012456194
Slavery has been a major institution of labor coercion throughout history. Colonial societies used slavery intensively … across the Americas, and slavery remained prevalent in most countries after independence from the European powers. We … investigate the impact of slavery on long-run development in Colombia. Our identification strategy compares municipalities that …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012460483
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 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
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
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