Slavery and Other Property Rights

Abstract

The institution of slavery is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development and less often among hunter-gatherers and advanced agrarian societies. We explain this pattern in a growth model with land and labour as inputs in production and an endogenously determined property rights institution. The economy endogenously transits from an egalitarian state with equal property rights to a despotic slave society where the elite own both people and land; thereafter, it endogenously transits into a free labour society, where the elite own the land but people are free.