The Market for Indentured Immigrants: Evidence on the Efficiency of Forward-Labor Contracting in Philadelphia, 1745–1773
- 3 March 1985
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in The Journal of Economic History
- Vol. 45 (4) , 855-868
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022050700035130
Abstract
Indentured servitude is modeled as a trans-Atlantic market in forward-labor contracts. The model is applied to servant-auction evidence in Philadelphia, and the determinants of contract prices are used to test the efficient-market hypothesis. While competing for servants in Europe, most of the expected price differences across servants were lost through arbitrage by recruiters.Keywords
This publication has 11 references indexed in Scilit:
- The incidence of servitude in trans-Atlantic migration, 1771–1804Explorations in Economic History, 1985
- The Organization of the Convict Trade to Maryland: Stevenson, Randolph and Cheston, 1768-1775The William and Mary Quarterly, 1985
- The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic AnalysisThe Journal of Economic History, 1984
- Contract Labor, Sugar, and Technology in the Nineteenth CenturyThe Journal of Economic History, 1983
- The Market Evaluation of Human Capital: The Case of Indentured ServitudeJournal of Political Economy, 1981
- Indentured Servitude: The Philadelphia Market, 1771–1773The Journal of Economic History, 1978
- Immigration and the colonial labor system an analysis of the length of indentureExplorations in Economic History, 1977
- Hedonic Prices and Implicit Markets: Product Differentiation in Pure CompetitionJournal of Political Economy, 1974
- Price Indexes and Quality ChangePublished by Harvard University Press ,1971
- The Passage to the ColoniesThe Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 1951