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Article: The efficiency of sharecropping: evidence from the postbellum south.
- Article from:
- Southern Economic Journal
- Article date:
- January 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Southern Economic Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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1. Introduction
Views on sharecropping have been and remain controversial. Following Adam Smith, virtually all classical economists considered sharecropping inefficient. Their argument was epitomized by Alfred Marshall (1920) and became the well-known Marshallian theory of sharecropping. (1) According to the Marshallian theory, sharecropping leads to Pareto-inefficient allocation of labor because sharecroppers are paid only a percentage, rather than all, of their marginal product of labor and thus would rationally reduce their work effort. Although it has been contradicted by other theoretical arguments (Johnson 1950; Cheung 1969; Reid 1973, 1977; Roumasset ...