Visiting Scholar Charles W. Calomiris

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Abstract

We investigate the determinants of slave family discounts, using data from the New Orleans slave market. We find large price discounts for families which cannot be explained by scale effects, childcare costs, legal restrictions, or transport costs. Because family members cared for each other, sellers found it advantageous to keep some families together. Evidence from the manifests of ships carrying slaves to be sold in New Orleans provides direct evidence for our model of selectivity bias in explaining slave family discounts. Children likely to have been shipped with their mothers are 1-2 inches shorter than other children.

Introduction

Since the publication of Fogel and Engerman's (1974a) Time on the Cross, economic historians have been actively debating the validity of one of their central propositions--that slaves were allowed, and encouraged, to maintain family ties because doing so enhanced the value of slaves to their owners. Kotlikoff (1979, 1992) investigated the potential effect of family connections on the value of slaves sold in the New Orleans market at the time of their sale. If preserving family ties enhanced the value of slaves to their owners, as Fogel and Engerman posited, the value of slave family members sold together would be higher. Kotlikoff found that the value of mother-fatherchild groups--a rare event in the data--was higher than the combined value of the members of the family if they were sold singly. However, other family combinations, including mother-child sales--by far the most common form of family sale--suffered large discounts when compared to the sales of identical family members sold separately.

Fogel and Engerman (1992: p. 258) argued that this finding could reflect a scale discount associated with slave sales--by selling the slaves as a group rather than singly, the sum of transactions costs would be reduced, or equivalently, buyers would realize a scale discount. If the discount outweighed the economic benefits associated with family ties, family members would sell at a discount rather than a premium. If that explanation were correct, it could be confirmed by empirical analysis of two questions: (1) Is there a scale discount for selling slaves irrespective of whether they are family members or not; and (2) Do slave groups of any particular size command higher market prices when the members of the group sold are family members (as opposed to unrelated group members)? To our knowledge, no one has investigated these questions empirically. . . .

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Charles W. Calomiris is a visiting scholar at AEI. Jonathan Pritchett is an associate professor of economics at Tulane University.