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Contractual Mix in Southern Agriculture since the Civil War: Facts, Hypotheses, and Tests

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Lee J. Alston  and
Robert Higgs
Lee J. Alston
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Economics, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts 02167
Robert Higgs
Affiliation:
Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195.
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Abstract

In the South after 1865, workers and property owners employed a variety of contracts—wage payment, crop sharing, and land rental—to bring together cooperating resources in agricultural production. The contractual mix varied over time and space, depending on the relative resource endowments of the contracting parties, the prevailing risk conditions, and the transactions costs of alternative contractual arrangements. To understand the contractual mix, certain empirical distinctions must be made, and the major hypotheses advanced to explain the mix must be seen as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. These hypotheses, however, differ in their demonstrated ability to account for the empirical variance. In addition to factual clarification and theoretical explication, the paper presents a new sample of plantation data and a new econometric procedure for performing more detailed and better controlled tests of hypotheses.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 327 - 353
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1982

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References

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26 Ibid., pp. 156–59.

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39 The plantation schedules for Georgia are in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department of the University of Georgia. We are most grateful to Robert Willingham, Head Librarian of the Rare Book Collection, for permission to copy the schedules and to J. Larry Gulley, Assistant Rare Books Librarian, for sharing with us his knowledge of Robert Preston Brooks. Without their assistance and hospitality, our work in Georgia would have been much less enjoyable. In addition, we acknowledge the able research assistance of John Sheftall of the University of Georgia.Google Scholar

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42 The regression coefficient for this vanable has no predictable sign. The variable is included in the equation to control for the absence of the theoretically correct measure of land value, namely, value per improved acre.Google Scholar

43 The regression coefficient for this variable has no theoretically predictable sign, but we must include the variable in equations (2) and (6) in order to isolate the net shifts between the fixed-rent tenant and wage worker classes.Google Scholar

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46 To the extent that our measures of land values are inaccurate—and individual land values are often reported with imprecision—the regression coefficient of the cotton variable (ICOT) will be biased toward zero because cotton was usually planted on the more valuable land, and land value has an opposite effect on the contractual mix.Google Scholar

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