African Slavery and the Reckoning of Brazil
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Series
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Speaker(s)Nuno Palma (University Of Manchester, United Kingdom)
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FieldMacroeconomics
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LocationErasmus University Rotterdam, Campus Woudestein, Polak 2-09
Rotterdam -
Date and time
March 24, 2025
11:30 - 12:30
Abstract
More enslaved Africans disembarked in Brazil than in any other country in the New World. Using new archival data, we build a real wages and inequality series covering 1574 to 1920 in Brazil, finding these were initially on a similar level to Europe, but as the slave trade increased, wages decreased, and inequality increased. Unskilled workers became among the poorest in the world. We use slave trade prohibition shocks to estimate the causal effect of ending slave imports on wages and inequality. The prohibitions led to an average increase of wages and a decrease in inequality. We investigate the mechanisms.