Freedom, Servitude and Voluntary Contract

Jonathan Conning and Michael Kevane

No 408, Economics Working Paper Archive at Hunter College from Hunter College Department of Economics

Abstract: We present a framework to revisit and reframe some important debates over the nature of free versus unfree labor and the economic consequences of emancipation. We use a simple general equilibrium model in which labor can be either free or coerced and where land and labor will be exchanged on markets that can be competitive or manipulated or via other non-market collusive arrangements. Tied labor-service contracts and other forms of 'servility' clauses are 'necessary' only as a strategy to help landlords sustain a collusive arrangement to pay workers wages below their marginal product. We discuss two purported paradoxed that have been stressed in the literature: the paradox of immiserizing emancipation (that explains why total output fell in so many post-emancipation societies) and the paradox of bans (that claims that interference with workers freedom to enter into voluntary contracts can only be Pareto-decreasing. We argue that while these paradoxes are generally valid when examined in the context of simpler bilateral contracting situations, they fail to consider important general equilibrium considerations.

JEL-codes: N50 O1 O12 O17 P14 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://urban.hunter.cuny.edu/~conning/papers/HunterEconWP408.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:htr:hcecon:408

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Paper Archive at Hunter College from Hunter College Department of Economics 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jonathan Conning ().