It examines why many English patent applications between 1783 and 1834 failed. Using new archival data, it shows that costly & strategically manipulated opposition procedures likely shaped who secured patents, with implications for how innovation was filtered in the early system

The implication of this for tenurial change are explored.

How empowered were women in pre-industrial East Asia? A study for Japan, 1600–1890, finds low gender wage gaps at 0.7. However, these women were not empowered due to low wage levels and the widespread land ownership by men, but not women. This may be why they married universally.

Its findings also provide, for the first time, a full picture of the totality of Scotland’s economy over the last 70 years by incorporating an estimate of North Sea oil and gas gross value added from within Scotland’s territorial waters.

Sellers being in urgent financial situations is positively correlated with the sales price.

This paper studies merchant apprenticeship based on records from sixteenth-century Germany. It contributes to literatures on human capital formation and the institutional foundations of pre-modern long-distance trade.

The latter had better opportunities to smooth consumption over the life cycle by setting money aside, although manual-worker households that survived into old age had some capacity for small savings, which may have eased but not offset the decline.