Lincoln's election produced Southern secession, war, and abolition. Using a new dataset on
slave sales, we examine connections between news and slave prices for the period 1856 …

Abstract Information asymmetry is a necessary prerequisite for testing adverse selection.
This paper applies this sequence of tests to Mauritian slave auctions. The theory of dynamic …

This paper examines the spatial relationship among slave prices, escape, and slave owners'
property rights using the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 as a natural experiment. The act …

We investigate determinants of slave family discounts in the New Orleans slave market. We
find large price discounts for families unrelated to scale effects, childcare costs, legal …

Although plantation records indicate that many slaves in the southern USA were artisans
and craftsmen, relatively few slaves were recorded as such on the New Orleans sales …

Richard Steckel and Nicolas Ziebarth (2016) find that biases in height by age imposed by
traders versus non-traders were negligible. Importantly, their method of identifying traders …

When imported slaves were first sold in New Orleans, buyers were unaware of the slaves'
unobservable characteristics. In time, the new owners learned more about their slaves and …

Human capital is the largest component of aggregate wealth, but its relation to other
macroeconomic variables is murky due to the lack of market prices. Valuing human capital …

The disparity in the prices of slaves in the antebellum south could have come from two
sources, disparity in the observed characteristics of the slaves, or disparity in the …

The effect states that when a fixed per‐unit cost is added to two substitutes, the more
expensive (higher quality) one becomes relatively cheaper, and, thus, its consumption will …