Turnover Cost and the Distribution of slave Labor in Anglo-America
- 1 June 1996
- journal article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in The Journal of Economic History
- Vol. 56 (2), 307-329
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022050700016466
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.Keywords
This publication has 20 references indexed in Scilit:
- Common LabourPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,1993
- Selection in the Market for Slaves: New Orleans, 1830-1860The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1993
- Employment Duration and Industrial Labor Mobility in the United States, 1880–1980The Journal of Economic History, 1992
- Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and IllinoisJournal of the Early Republic, 1989
- Chinese immigration and contract labor in the late nineteenth centuryExplorations in Economic History, 1987
- Slaves as Fixed Capital: Slave Labor and Southern Economic DevelopmentJournal of American History, 1977
- Disciplining Slave Ironworkers in the Antebellum South: Coercion, Conciliation, and AccommodationThe American Historical Review, 1974
- Information in the Labor MarketJournal of Political Economy, 1962
- The Iron Industry in Ante-Bellum South CarolinaThe Journal of Southern History, 1954
- The Labor and Immigration Problem of South Carolina during ReconstructionThe Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 1931