EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Adverse Selection in the Market for Slaves: New Orleans, 1830–1860

Bruce C. Greenwald and Robert R. Glasspiegel

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1983, vol. 98, issue 3, 479-499

Abstract: This paper seeks to cast some light on the importance of adverse selection in competitive markets by examining the market for the sale of slaves in pre-Civil War New Orleans. Estimates of the degree of adverse selection in the New Orleans market are obtained by examining the relative prices of slaves from different regions of origin. These estimates indicate that slaves brought to market may on average have been of 20 percent to 40 percent lower quality than the slave population in general, and that good slaves were perhaps three times less likely to be sold than low quality ones.

Date: 1983
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/1886022 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:qjecon:v:98:y:1983:i:3:p:479-499.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:98:y:1983:i:3:p:479-499.