Leeson, Peter T.; Boettke, Peter J.; Lemke, Jayme S. - In: Review of Behavioral Economics 1 (2014) 4, pp. 349-379
For over a century, English husbands sold their wives at auctions. We argue that wife sales were an institutional response to an unusual constellation of property rights in Industrial Revolution-era English law. That constellation simultaneously required most wives to obtain their husbands'...