Applying hedonic regression technique to slave transactions data, this article
estimates prices of Korean slaves from 1678-1889. Female and male slave
prices followed an inverted U-shaped age pattern reaching peaks in their
twenties and thirties, respectively, with female slaves being more expensive
than male slaves. Nominal slave prices tended to fall until around 1740 and
then to rise, a pattern also found in grain and land prices and consistent with
a trend in money supply. Slave prices as standardized by rice prices tended to
fall in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which indicates declining
marginal productivity of labor.