Preserving Slave Families for Profit: Traders' Incentives and Pricing in the New Orleans Slave Market

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.

Preserving Slave Families for Profit: Traders' Incentives and Pricing in the New Orleans Slave Market

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 restrictions, or transport costs. We posit that because family members voluntarily cared for each other, sellers sometimes found it advantageous to keep families together (when families included needy or dependent members). Evidence from ship manifests carrying slaves for sale in New Orleans provides direct evidence for selectivity bias in explaining slave family discounts. Children likely to have been shipped with their mothers are 1 to 2 inches shorter than other children

The MDG Paradigm, Productive Capacities and the Future of Poverty Reduction

The MDGs are important as they have led to a new international development consensus. However, this consensus has not effectively reduced poverty as it is based on a ‘Faustian bargain’, in which international commitment to promoting economic development and reducing global income inequality has evaporated, and national and international policies have focused on promoting global integration rather than production and employment. It is necessary now to build a new consensus around global sustainable development and a new policy narrative founded on the development of productive capacities and on rebalancing the terms of development partnership

Cyclospora: an enigma worth unraveling.

In part, Cyclospora cayetanensis owes its recognition as an emerging pathogen to the increased use of staining methods for detecting enteric parasites such as Cryptosporidium. First reported in patients in New Guinea in 1977 but thought to be a coccidian parasite of the genus Isospora, C. cayetanensis received little attention until it was again described in 1985 in New York and Peru. In the early 1990s, human infection associated with waterborne transmission of C. cayetanensis was suspected; foodborne transmission was likewise suggested in early studies. The parasite was associated with several disease outbreaks in the United States during 1996 and 1997. This article reviews current knowledge about C. cayetanensis (including its association with waterborne and foodborne transmission), unresolved issues, and research needs

Empirical Legal Studies Before 1940: A Bibliographic Essay

The modern empirical legal studies movement has well-known antecedents in the law and society and law and economics traditions of the latter half of the 20th century. Less well known is the body of empirical research on legal phenomena from the period prior to World War II. This paper is an extensive bibliographic essay that surveys the English language empirical legal research from approximately 1940 and earlier. The essay is arranged around the themes in the research: criminal justice, civil justice (general studies of civil litigation, auto accident litigation and compensation, divorce, small claims, jurisdiction and procedure, civil juries), debt and bankruptcy, banking, appellate courts, legal needs, legal profession (including legal education), and judicial staffing and selection. Accompanying the essay is an extensive bibliography of research articles, books, and reports

Governing multisectoral action for health in low- and middle-income countries

Kumanan Rasanathan and colleagues argue that the potential of multisectoral collaboration for improving health remains untapped in many low- and middle-income countries