Trevon D Logan
Biographic Data
| ID | 382804 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Trevon D Logan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Trevon D |
| FAMILY NAME | Logan |
| SIGNATURE | LOGAN T D |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9264-2603 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 233 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
One Giant Leap: Emancipation and Aggregate Economic Gains
We characterize American slavery as inefficient, whereby emancipation generated substantial aggregate economic gains. Coercion distorted labor markets, raising the marginal cost of labor substantially above its marginal benefit. Production came at immense costs imposed on enslaved people that reduced aggregate economic surplus (the total value of output minus total costs incurred). Costs of enslavement are inherently difficult to quantify, which …
Her Property Transactions: White Women and the Frequency of Female Ownership in the Antebellum Era
The traditional historical narrative claims that White women were rarely involved in market transactions for enslaved people in the antebellum United States. Using transaction records, notary statements, and runaway advertisements, we provide the first quantitative estimates of the extent of White women’s involvement in antebellum slave transactions as owners of record. Contrary to the narrative, we find that White women were quite frequently not…
Black-Friendly businesses in cities during the Civil Rights Era
Quantitative analysis of Black business districts and evidence on the magnitude of social change leading up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in particular as it relates to the accessibility of public accommodations, is limited. We combine newly digitized data on the precise geocoded location of nearly 6000 Green Book establishments – public accommodations that were friendly towards African American clientele – across major urban ar…
In Memoria: Rodney J. Andrews
Whitelashing: Black Politicians, Taxes, and Violence
This paper provides the first evidence of the effect of tax policy on violent attacks against Black politicians. I find a positive effect of local tax revenue on subsequent violence against Black politicians. A dollar increase in per capita county taxes in 1870 increased the likelihood of a violent attack by more than 25 percent. The result is robust to controls for numerous economic, historical, and political factors. I also find counties where …
American Enslavement and the Recovery of Black Economic History
This paper reconsiders the evidence needed to answer pressing questions of economic history and racial inequality, the Third Phase of research on American Enslavement and its Aftermath. First, I briefly summarize how economists have sought to understand slavery as an institution. Second, using my family’s narrative as a lens, I show how answers to questions from economic history and economic theory can be answered by expanding our evidentiary bas…
The antebellum roots of distinctively black names
This paper explores the existence of distinctively Black names in the antebellum era. Building on recent research that documents the existence of a national naming pattern for African American males in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Cook, Logan, and Parman, Explorations in Economic History 53:64–82, 2014), we analyze three distinct and novel antebellum data sources and uncover three stylized facts. First, the Black names ident…
The Persistence of Historical Racial Violence and Political Suppression: Implications for Contemporary Regional Inequality
We provide evidence on the link between lynchings and a range of political and economic outcomes for Black Americans. We show that lynchings are related to racial and political motives among whites that keep Black Americans disconnected from the political process. This political and racial gradient to lynchings is related to public finance and redistribution within states and localities and has potentially long-lasting implications for investment…
Wealth Implications of Slavery and Racial Discrimination for African American Descendants of the Enslaved
We compare the 2018 per capita Black–White wealth gap of about US$352,250 with portions of the estimated total cost of slavery and discrimination to African American descendants of the enslaved. For the period of slavery in the United States, we arrive at estimates of about US$12 to US$13 trillion in 2018 dollars using Darity’s land-based and Marketti’s price-based estimation methods, respectively. Estimates using Craemer’s wage-based method tend…
Do Black Politicians Matter? Evidence from Reconstruction
This paper exploits the history of Reconstruction after the American Civil War to estimate the effect of politician race on public finance. While the effect of black politicians is positive and significant, black officials may be endogenous to electoral preferences for redistribution. I therefore use the number of free blacks in the antebellum era (1860) as an instrument for black political leaders during Reconstruction. Instrumental variables (I…
Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching
The literature on ethnic fractionalization and conflict has yet to be extended to the American past. In particular, the empirical relationship between racial residential segregation and lynching is unknown. The existing economic, social, and political theories of lynching contain implicit hypotheses about the relationship between racial segregation and racial violence, consistent with more general theories of social conflict. Because Southern lyn…
On the marital status of U. S. slaves: Evidence from Touro Infirmary, New Orleans, Louisiana
Segregation and mortality over time and space
Rural Segregation and Racial Violence: Historical Effects of Spatial Racism
To review the evidence of changes in segregation over time, we use a newly developed household-level measure of residential segregation that can distinguish between the effects of increasing racial homogeneity of a location and the tendency to segregate within a location given a particular racial composition (Logan and Parman ). This household measure of segregation reveals high levels of segregation in the South and rising levels of segregation …
Economics, Sexuality, and Male Sex Work
Male sex work generates sales in excess of one billion dollars annually in the United States. Recent sex scandals involving prominent leaders and government shutdowns of escort websites have focused attention on this business, but despite the attention that comes when these scandals break, we know very little about how the market works. Economics, Sexuality, and Male Sex Work is the first economic analysis of male sex work. Competition, the role …
Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching
The literature on ethnic fractionalization and conflict has not been extended to the American past. In particular, the empirical relationship between racial residential segregation and lynching is unknown. The existing economic, social, and political theories of lynching contain hypotheses about the relationship between racial segregation and racial violence, consistent with theories of social conflict. Since Southern lynching occurred in rural a…
The National Rise in Residential Segregation
Exploiting complete census manuscript files, we derive a new segregation measure using the racial similarity of next-door neighbors. The fineness of our measure reveals new facts not captured by traditional segregation indices. First, segregation doubled nationally from 1880 to 1940. Second, contrary to prior estimates, Southern urban areas were the most segregated in the country and remained so over time. Third, increasing segregation in the twe…
The Economics of Male Sex Work
This chapter examines the economics of male prostitution as practiced in the United States. It begins with an overview of some basic features and organization of the online market for male sex work. It then considers the unique social circumstances that occur in male prostitution and how they inform the economic analysis. It also reviews two empirical economic issues that have been analyzed in the literature: the role of asymmetric information an…
The mortality consequences of distinctively black names
On the heterogeneity of dowry motives
A Time (Not) Apart: A Lesson in Economic History from Cotton Picking Books
I use the individual-level records from my own family in rural Mississippi to estimate the agricultural productivity of African Americans in manual cotton picking nearly a century after Emancipation, 1952–1965. On average, the Logan children were more than 95 % as productive as enslaved children from the same region in the late antebellum era, 1850–1860. Gender differences in productivity were smaller than among enslaved children and disappeared …
The Transformation of Hunger Revisited: Reply
The higher calorie levels reported in Gazeley, Newell, Bezabith (2015) are a function of a conversion of food quantities to calories that is weighted towards contemporary, calorie-rich foods. Their conversion uses the full distribution of contemporary foods and should not be applied to historical populations. Since Gazeley, Newell, Bezabith assume that industrial workers in the past had access to contemporary foods, the revised calorie levels ref…
Is There Dowry Inflation in South Asia: An Assessment of the Evidence
This article is the first systematic attempt to measure the existence and degree of dowry inflation in South Asia. The popular press and scholarly literature have assumed dowry inflation in South Asia for some time, and there are now a number of theoretical papers that have attempted to explain the rise of dowries in South Asia. Despite these advances, there has been no systematic study of dowry inflation. Using large-sample retrospective survey …
The Dynamics of African-American Health: A Historical Perspective
There are many misconceptions about African American health that have subtle and continuing influence on health policy debates. Unfortunately, many of the misconceptions surrounding African American health have an implicit historical dimension, and the usual response for the lack of evidence in support of any myth is that “the data does not exist” to shed full light on the given question. This is unfortunate as there is now a growing body of evid…
Distinctively black names in the American past
Personal Characteristics, Sexual Behaviors, and Male Sex Work: A Quantitative Approach
Male sex workers serve multiple groups (i.e., gay-identified men, heterosexually-identified men, and their own sexual partners), making them a unique source to test theories of gender, masculinity, and sexuality. To date, most scholarship on this topic has been qualitative. I assembled a dataset from the largest online male sex worker website to conduct the first quantitative analysis of male escorts in the United States. I find the geographic di…
The National Rise in Residential Segregation
Exploiting complete census manuscript files, we derive a new segregation measure using the racial similarity of next-door neighbors. The fineness of our measure reveals new facts not captured by traditional segregation indices. First, segregation doubled nationally from 1880 to 1940. Second, contrary to prior estimates, Southern urban areas were the most segregated in the country and remained so over time. Third, increasing segregation in the twe…
Wealth Implications of Slavery and Racial Discrimination for African American Descendants of the Enslaved
We compare the 2018 per capita Black–White wealth gap of about US$352,250 with portions of the estimated total cost of slavery and discrimination to African American descendants of the enslaved. For the period of slavery in the United States, we arrive at estimates of about US$12 to US$13 trillion in 2018 dollars using Darity’s land-based and Marketti’s price-based estimation methods, respectively. Estimates using Craemer’s wage-based method tend…
Distinctively black names in the American past
Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching
The literature on ethnic fractionalization and conflict has yet to be extended to the American past. In particular, the empirical relationship between racial residential segregation and lynching is unknown. The existing economic, social, and political theories of lynching contain implicit hypotheses about the relationship between racial segregation and racial violence, consistent with more general theories of social conflict. Because Southern lyn…
Do Black Politicians Matter? Evidence from Reconstruction
This paper exploits the history of Reconstruction after the American Civil War to estimate the effect of politician race on public finance. While the effect of black politicians is positive and significant, black officials may be endogenous to electoral preferences for redistribution. I therefore use the number of free blacks in the antebellum era (1860) as an instrument for black political leaders during Reconstruction. Instrumental variables (I…
Health, human capital, and African-American migration before 1910
The mortality consequences of distinctively black names
The Persistence of Historical Racial Violence and Political Suppression: Implications for Contemporary Regional Inequality
We provide evidence on the link between lynchings and a range of political and economic outcomes for Black Americans. We show that lynchings are related to racial and political motives among whites that keep Black Americans disconnected from the political process. This political and racial gradient to lynchings is related to public finance and redistribution within states and localities and has potentially long-lasting implications for investment…
Segregation and mortality over time and space
Nutrition and Well-Being in the Late Nineteenth Century
Using the 1888 Cost of Living Survey, I estimate the demand for calories of American and British industrial workers. I find that the income and expenditure elasticities of calories for American households are significantly lower than the corresponding elasticities for British households, suggesting that American industrial workers were nutritionally better off than their British counterparts. I further find that the calorie elasticity differentia…
The antebellum roots of distinctively black names
This paper explores the existence of distinctively Black names in the antebellum era. Building on recent research that documents the existence of a national naming pattern for African American males in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Cook, Logan, and Parman, Explorations in Economic History 53:64–82, 2014), we analyze three distinct and novel antebellum data sources and uncover three stylized facts. First, the Black names ident…
Rural Segregation and Racial Violence: Historical Effects of Spatial Racism
To review the evidence of changes in segregation over time, we use a newly developed household-level measure of residential segregation that can distinguish between the effects of increasing racial homogeneity of a location and the tendency to segregate within a location given a particular racial composition (Logan and Parman ). This household measure of segregation reveals high levels of segregation in the South and rising levels of segregation …
On the heterogeneity of dowry motives
The Transformation of Hunger: The Demand for Calories Past and Present
According to conventional income measures, American and British industrial workers in the late nineteenth century were two to four times as wealthy as those in developing countries today. Estimated calorie expenditure elasticities of American and British industrial workers based on the 1888 Cost of Living Survey are greater than calorie elasticity estimates for developing countries today, which suggest that yesterday's wealthy workers were hungri…
Whitelashing: Black Politicians, Taxes, and Violence
This paper provides the first evidence of the effect of tax policy on violent attacks against Black politicians. I find a positive effect of local tax revenue on subsequent violence against Black politicians. A dollar increase in per capita county taxes in 1870 increased the likelihood of a violent attack by more than 25 percent. The result is robust to controls for numerous economic, historical, and political factors. I also find counties where …
Is There Dowry Inflation in South Asia: An Assessment of the Evidence
This article is the first systematic attempt to measure the existence and degree of dowry inflation in South Asia. The popular press and scholarly literature have assumed dowry inflation in South Asia for some time, and there are now a number of theoretical papers that have attempted to explain the rise of dowries in South Asia. Despite these advances, there has been no systematic study of dowry inflation. Using large-sample retrospective survey …
Food, nutrition, and substitution in the late nineteenth century
On the marital status of U. S. slaves: Evidence from Touro Infirmary, New Orleans, Louisiana
The Transformation of Hunger Revisited: Reply
The higher calorie levels reported in Gazeley, Newell, Bezabith (2015) are a function of a conversion of food quantities to calories that is weighted towards contemporary, calorie-rich foods. Their conversion uses the full distribution of contemporary foods and should not be applied to historical populations. Since Gazeley, Newell, Bezabith assume that industrial workers in the past had access to contemporary foods, the revised calorie levels ref…
The Dynamics of African-American Health: A Historical Perspective
There are many misconceptions about African American health that have subtle and continuing influence on health policy debates. Unfortunately, many of the misconceptions surrounding African American health have an implicit historical dimension, and the usual response for the lack of evidence in support of any myth is that “the data does not exist” to shed full light on the given question. This is unfortunate as there is now a growing body of evid…
A Time (Not) Apart: A Lesson in Economic History from Cotton Picking Books
I use the individual-level records from my own family in rural Mississippi to estimate the agricultural productivity of African Americans in manual cotton picking nearly a century after Emancipation, 1952–1965. On average, the Logan children were more than 95 % as productive as enslaved children from the same region in the late antebellum era, 1850–1860. Gender differences in productivity were smaller than among enslaved children and disappeared …
Is the Calorie Distribution Log Normal? Evidence from the Nineteenth Century
In a classic article written in 1994, Robert Fogel assumed that the distribution of calories per head is log normal and that the variance of income per head is greater than the variance of calories per head. Using these assumptions, Fogel was able to conclude that approximately 50 percent of the economic growth since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is due to changes in nutrition. The author tests those two assumptions with the 1888 cos…
Is the Calorie Distribution Log Normal? Evidence from the Nineteenth Century
In a classic article written in 1994, Robert Fogel assumed that the distribution of calories per head is log normal and that the variance of income per head is greater than the variance of calories per head. Using these assumptions, Fogel was able to conclude that approximately 50 percent of the economic growth since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is due to changes in nutrition. The author tests those two assumptions with the 1888 cos…
Nutrition and Well-Being in the Late Nineteenth Century
Using the 1888 Cost of Living Survey, I estimate the demand for calories of American and British industrial workers. I find that the income and expenditure elasticities of calories for American households are significantly lower than the corresponding elasticities for British households, suggesting that American industrial workers were nutritionally better off than their British counterparts. I further find that the calorie elasticity differentia…
Food, nutrition, and substitution in the late nineteenth century
Are Engel Curve Estimates of CPI Bias Biased
A recent literature has advanced the use of Engel curves to estimate overall CPI bias. In this paper, I show that the methodology is sensitive to the modeling of household demography. Existing estimates of CPI bias do not account for the changing effect of household size on budget shares, and this can lead to omitted variable bias. Since the effect of household size on demand changes over time the drift in Engel curves attributed to CPI bias is p…
Health, human capital, and African-American migration before 1910
The Transformation of Hunger: The Demand for Calories Past and Present
According to conventional income measures, American and British industrial workers in the late nineteenth century were two to four times as wealthy as those in developing countries today. Estimated calorie expenditure elasticities of American and British industrial workers based on the 1888 Cost of Living Survey are greater than calorie elasticity estimates for developing countries today, which suggest that yesterday's wealthy workers were hungri…
Personal Characteristics, Sexual Behaviors, and Male Sex Work: A Quantitative Approach
Male sex workers serve multiple groups (i.e., gay-identified men, heterosexually-identified men, and their own sexual partners), making them a unique source to test theories of gender, masculinity, and sexuality. To date, most scholarship on this topic has been qualitative. I assembled a dataset from the largest online male sex worker website to conduct the first quantitative analysis of male escorts in the United States. I find the geographic di…
Is There Dowry Inflation in South Asia: An Assessment of the Evidence
This article is the first systematic attempt to measure the existence and degree of dowry inflation in South Asia. The popular press and scholarly literature have assumed dowry inflation in South Asia for some time, and there are now a number of theoretical papers that have attempted to explain the rise of dowries in South Asia. Despite these advances, there has been no systematic study of dowry inflation. Using large-sample retrospective survey …
The Dynamics of African-American Health: A Historical Perspective
There are many misconceptions about African American health that have subtle and continuing influence on health policy debates. Unfortunately, many of the misconceptions surrounding African American health have an implicit historical dimension, and the usual response for the lack of evidence in support of any myth is that “the data does not exist” to shed full light on the given question. This is unfortunate as there is now a growing body of evid…
Distinctively black names in the American past
On the heterogeneity of dowry motives
A Time (Not) Apart: A Lesson in Economic History from Cotton Picking Books
I use the individual-level records from my own family in rural Mississippi to estimate the agricultural productivity of African Americans in manual cotton picking nearly a century after Emancipation, 1952–1965. On average, the Logan children were more than 95 % as productive as enslaved children from the same region in the late antebellum era, 1850–1860. Gender differences in productivity were smaller than among enslaved children and disappeared …
The Transformation of Hunger Revisited: Reply
The higher calorie levels reported in Gazeley, Newell, Bezabith (2015) are a function of a conversion of food quantities to calories that is weighted towards contemporary, calorie-rich foods. Their conversion uses the full distribution of contemporary foods and should not be applied to historical populations. Since Gazeley, Newell, Bezabith assume that industrial workers in the past had access to contemporary foods, the revised calorie levels ref…
The Economics of Male Sex Work
This chapter examines the economics of male prostitution as practiced in the United States. It begins with an overview of some basic features and organization of the online market for male sex work. It then considers the unique social circumstances that occur in male prostitution and how they inform the economic analysis. It also reviews two empirical economic issues that have been analyzed in the literature: the role of asymmetric information an…
The mortality consequences of distinctively black names
Economics, Sexuality, and Male Sex Work
Male sex work generates sales in excess of one billion dollars annually in the United States. Recent sex scandals involving prominent leaders and government shutdowns of escort websites have focused attention on this business, but despite the attention that comes when these scandals break, we know very little about how the market works. Economics, Sexuality, and Male Sex Work is the first economic analysis of male sex work. Competition, the role …
Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching
The literature on ethnic fractionalization and conflict has not been extended to the American past. In particular, the empirical relationship between racial residential segregation and lynching is unknown. The existing economic, social, and political theories of lynching contain hypotheses about the relationship between racial segregation and racial violence, consistent with theories of social conflict. Since Southern lynching occurred in rural a…
The National Rise in Residential Segregation
Exploiting complete census manuscript files, we derive a new segregation measure using the racial similarity of next-door neighbors. The fineness of our measure reveals new facts not captured by traditional segregation indices. First, segregation doubled nationally from 1880 to 1940. Second, contrary to prior estimates, Southern urban areas were the most segregated in the country and remained so over time. Third, increasing segregation in the twe…
Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching
The literature on ethnic fractionalization and conflict has yet to be extended to the American past. In particular, the empirical relationship between racial residential segregation and lynching is unknown. The existing economic, social, and political theories of lynching contain implicit hypotheses about the relationship between racial segregation and racial violence, consistent with more general theories of social conflict. Because Southern lyn…
On the marital status of U. S. slaves: Evidence from Touro Infirmary, New Orleans, Louisiana
Segregation and mortality over time and space
Rural Segregation and Racial Violence: Historical Effects of Spatial Racism
To review the evidence of changes in segregation over time, we use a newly developed household-level measure of residential segregation that can distinguish between the effects of increasing racial homogeneity of a location and the tendency to segregate within a location given a particular racial composition (Logan and Parman ). This household measure of segregation reveals high levels of segregation in the South and rising levels of segregation …
Wealth Implications of Slavery and Racial Discrimination for African American Descendants of the Enslaved
We compare the 2018 per capita Black–White wealth gap of about US$352,250 with portions of the estimated total cost of slavery and discrimination to African American descendants of the enslaved. For the period of slavery in the United States, we arrive at estimates of about US$12 to US$13 trillion in 2018 dollars using Darity’s land-based and Marketti’s price-based estimation methods, respectively. Estimates using Craemer’s wage-based method tend…
Do Black Politicians Matter? Evidence from Reconstruction
This paper exploits the history of Reconstruction after the American Civil War to estimate the effect of politician race on public finance. While the effect of black politicians is positive and significant, black officials may be endogenous to electoral preferences for redistribution. I therefore use the number of free blacks in the antebellum era (1860) as an instrument for black political leaders during Reconstruction. Instrumental variables (I…
The Persistence of Historical Racial Violence and Political Suppression: Implications for Contemporary Regional Inequality
We provide evidence on the link between lynchings and a range of political and economic outcomes for Black Americans. We show that lynchings are related to racial and political motives among whites that keep Black Americans disconnected from the political process. This political and racial gradient to lynchings is related to public finance and redistribution within states and localities and has potentially long-lasting implications for investment…
Economics (22 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Political science (17 works) · Demographic economics (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Demography (11 works) · Geography (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (8 works) · Demography (7 works)