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Migration and Human Capital: Self-Selection of Indentured Servants to the Americas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2006

Ran Abramitzky  and
Fabio Braggion
Ran Abramitzky
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Stanford University, Landau Economics Building, 579 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305-6072. E-mail: ranabr@stanford.edu.
Fabio Braggion
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Finance, Tilburg University and CentER, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, P.O. Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands. E-mail: f.braggion@uvt.nl.
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Abstract

When contracting, European merchants could at least partially observe characteristics such as the health, physical strength, and education of indentured servants. These characteristics, unobservable to us, were likely to influence servitude duration, which is observable to us. We employ a switching regression model to analyze 2,066 servitude contracts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Servants were positively selected to American mainland colonies in terms of their unobservable human capital and negatively selected to the West Indies. Thus, the relative quality of migrants' human capital may have played a role in the subsequent relative economic performance of these regions.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 66 , Issue 4 , December 2006 , pp. 882 - 905
Copyright
© 2006 The Economic History Association

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