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A Peculiar Sample: A Reply to Steckel and Ziebarth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2016

Jonathan Pritchett  and
Herman Freudenberger
Jonathan Pritchett
Affiliation:
Jonathan Pritchett is Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Tulane University, 6823 St. Charles Avenue, 206 Tilton Hall, New Orleans, LA 70118. E-mail: [email protected]
Herman Freudenberger
Affiliation:
Herman Freudenberger is Professor Emeritus, Department of Economics, Tulane University, 6823 St. Charles Avenue, 206 Tilton Hall, New Orleans, LA 70118. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

Richard Steckel and Nicolas Ziebarth (2016) find that biases in height by age imposed by traders versus non-traders were negligible. Importantly, their method of identifying traders differs from that of Jonathan Pritchett and Herman Freudenberger (1992). Using a sample of inward coastwise manifests for the port of New Orleans, we show that Steckel and Ziebarth made errors classifying shippers, that they underestimate the relative number of slaves shipped by traders, and that their empirical estimates of selection bias are attenuated towards zero.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 76 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 139 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2016 

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Footnotes

The authors benefited from the helpful comments and suggestions of James Alm, Stanley Engerman, Timothy Guinnane, and Paul Rhode.

References

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