Bruce Greenwald and Robert Glasspiegel (1983) argue that adverse selection depressed the market prices of slaves, causing current researchers to overestimate the rate of return from slavery. In this paper, the authors test for the presence of adverse selection by comparing the prices of local slaves with the prices of slaves sold from estate sales. They find no difference in the prices of these slaves, from which they conclude that there was no significant adverse selection in the market. Instead, the authors propose an alternative explanation for the observed pattern of slave prices based on the costs of shipping slaves to the New Orleans market. Copyright 1993, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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