The Cries of the Harvesters: A Natural Experiment on the Intergenerational Effects of Slavery

We examine the causal effect of slavery on the formation of African American human capital by taking advantage of the natural experiment provided by emancipation. After the end of the Civil War, African Americans of all ages... [ view full abstract ]

We examine the causal effect of slavery on the formation of African American human capital by taking advantage of the natural experiment provided by emancipation. After the end of the Civil War, African Americans of all ages became free for reasons unrelated to their age, which can be seen as their having been exogenously assigned periods of enslavement of different durations. Using linked census data from 1870-1930 to explore the multigenerational effect of slavery, we find that the causal effect of one’s grandfather spending an additional year as a slave reduces the probability of being literate and of being in school by roughly half a percentage point.