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,...

This paper considers a successive oligopoly model in which a vertically-intergrated firm(VI firm) can buy or sell intermediate goods. We find that when there are only a small number of VI firms in the market, they tend to buyor even to store up intermediate goods. In our setting, a vertical...

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...