In a case study of Taiwan's tea industry during the Japanese colonial period, we identify an important function of middlemen: sorting. The transaction cost saved by the intermediary due to sorting is shown to be empirically significant. We also study other services provided by tea middlemen,...

To evade land taxes, most land in Taiwan during the Ching Dynasty (1662-1895) was not registered. When the Japanese started to colonize Taiwan at the turn of the 20th century, a thorough land survey was made, and all surveyed land became registered. This paper studies how this institutional...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between income inequality and bequest division rules, an old but untouched topic addressed by Sir Josiah Stamp nearly seventy years ago. We show that the bequest income transition rule for each child should be linearly combined to form...