Choice of slavery institutions in Ancient Greece: Athenian chattels and Spartan helots
从经济学角度解释古希腊雅典和斯巴达为何采用不同的奴隶制度，认为奴隶逃跑或反抗的概率、土地肥沃度决定的生产技术类型以及监管成本是主要影响因素。
Abstract The ancient Greek city-states were slave societies, but the institutions of slavery differed across them. The slaves of democratic Athens were foreigners bought as chattels labouring in agriculture, craftsmanship, banking, mining, and domestic services and were often given some limited freedoms and extra pay. On the contrary, the helots, the slaves of oligarchic Sparta, were indigenous of the lands they cultivated for their masters and were treated harshly. The study offers an economic explanation of the different slavery systems. Modelling the slaveholder as a profit maximiser, it attributes the different systems to differences in the probabilities of the slaves running away or revolting, the dependence of output on effort-intensive or care-intensive production technology, which depends on the fertility of the soil and affects whether the slave is treated kindly instead of harshly, and the cost of guarding slaves under different regimes.