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Turnover Cost and the Distribution of slave Labor in Anglo-America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Christopher Hanes
Christopher Hanes
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104.
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Abstract

In the eighteenth-century British Empire and the antebellum South, slaves were concentrated in domestic service and rural enterprises like agriculture and ironworks. I argue that employers in these sectors chose to employ slaves rather than free labor because they faced especially high turnover costs—that is, costs of searching for a worker and going without labor when a free worker quit or was fired. In the absence of slavery, these sectors were marked by other institutions designed to deal with turnover costs: indentured servitude, employment agencies, and deferred compensation.

Type
Papers Presented at the Fifty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , June 1996 , pp. 307 - 329
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1996

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