Evsey Domar first presented this model in his 1970 paper, “ The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis” published in the Economic History Review.
In his revisiting of the hypothesis, Domar aims to give it wider applicability while focusing more on an analysis that yields an economic model as an explanation of the causes of slavery.
Additionally, this economic model plays an incredibly important role in the analysis of the causes of slavery in the Colonial American South.
Where Domar argues that labor scarcity is a necessary but exogenous political factor needed for serfdom, Rosa challenges his view by showing that “in an agrarian subsistence economy the complementary conditions of serfdom are (a) oligopsony power in labor demand, sustained by (b) an oligopolistic supply of violence by large land owners.” In addition, Professor Erik Green of Lund University argues that Domar's model fails in explaining the origins of slavery in Cape Colony, South Africa, where the consensus is that slavery evolved as an urban phenomenon, which would call into question the land/labor ratio Domar uses to explain the causes of slavery and serfdom.
Moreover, Professor Jonathon Cunning of Hunter University authored a paper titled “On the Causes of Slavery or Serfdom and the Roads to Agrarian Capitalism: Domar’s Hypothesis Revisited”.
In his paper, Cunning offers a “simple general equilibrium formalization of Domar’s famous hypothesis on the causes of slavery or serfdom that emphasizes the interactions between factor endowments, the nature of the production technologies, and the initial distribution of property rights over land.” Cunning's paper is viewed more so as an expansion upon Domar's model rather than a direct challenge to his hypothesis.