Engerman's students included Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, David Eltis, Gary Gorton, Art Laffer, Jeremy Lin[citation needed], and Robert L. Paquette.
[1] The critical reception of Engerman's most widely read work, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (co-authored with Robert Fogel) was unique in its public visibility.
Beard's economic analysis of the Constitution in its longevity, Time on the Cross made a variety of politically charged claims based on cliometric quantitative methods.
"[2][non-primary source needed] Charles Crowe offered a summary of the work: "The cliometricians announced the scientific discovery of a vastly different South led by confident and effective slaveowning entrepreneurs firmly wedded to handsome profits from a booming economy with high per capita incomes and an efficiency ratio 35 per- cent greater than that of free Northern agriculture.
[1] According to The New York Times, a panel about the book hosted by Engerman and Fogel at Rochester, and attended by about 100 academics, turned so contentious that it the local press termed it "scholarly warfare".
[1] Engerman co-authored an article entitled "History Lessons: Institutions, Factor Endowments, and Paths of Development in the New World" with Kenneth Sokoloff, which can be found in The Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Sokoloff and Engerman claim that in areas such as Cuba which possessed land suitable for sugar and coffee, the soil quality led to economies of scale and plantation agriculture and slave labor.