1985/12/01 by Farley Grubb · 2 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Historical Economic and Social Studies #Housing Market and Economics #Taxation and Compliance Studies #Servant #Arbitrage #Economics #Immigration #Test (biology) #Labour economics #Financial economics #Law #Political science
paper · doi:10.1017/s0022050700035130
openalex publication_date 1985/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Indentured servitude is modeled as a trans-Atlantic market in forward-labor contracts. The model is applied to servant-auction evidence in Philadelphia, and the determinants of contract prices are used to test the efficient-market hypothesis. While competing for servants in Europe, most of the expected price differences across servants were lost through arbitrage by recruiters.