P-Values on the Free-Slave State Border: A Critique of Bleakley and Rhode

Joseph Francis

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Hoyt Bleakley and Paul Rhode use a “regression discontinuity design” (RDD) to find a persistent negative effect of slavery’s legality on rural population density throughout the period from 1790 to 1860. Yet their reported results cannot be replicated. Instead, the replication shows slavery’s negative effects only become statistically significant from 1840 onwards. Furthermore, the addition of an interaction term for slavery’s legality multiplied by longitude suggests that slavery may have facilitated the westward expansion of the Southern frontier in the antebellum period. This does not support the claim that slavery impeded the growth of American capitalism.

Keywords: Slavery; American capitalism; economic history; replication; regression dis-continuity design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 N11 N21 N51 O43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/122197/1/MPRA_paper_122197.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:122197

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().