Outside Options, Coercion, and Wages: Removing the Sugar Coating
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In economies with a large informal sector firms can increase profits by reducing workers' outside options in that informal sector. We formalize this idea in a simple model of an agricultural economy with plantation owners who lobby the government to enact coercive policies-e.g. the eviction and incarceration of squatting small-hold farmers-that reduce the value to working outside the formal sector. Using unique data for 14 British West Indies 'sugar islands' from the year of slave emancipation in 1838 until 1913, we examine the impact of plantation owners' power on wages and coercion-related incarceration. To gain identification, we utilize exogenous variation in the ease with which smallholders could evade the plantation system in the different islands over time. Where evading the plantation system became exogenously easier, planter power declined, incarceration rates dropped, and agricultural wages rose, accompanied by a decline in formal agricultural employment. Most of the wage increase can be statistically explained by the reduced coercion of smallholders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".