This paper presents annual Swedish time series data on the top marginal tax wedge and marginal tax wedges on labour income for a low-, average- and high-income earner for the period 1862 -2010. These data are unique in their consistency, thoroughness and timespan covered. We identify four...

Between 1660 and 1830, Parliament passed thousands of acts restructuring rights to real and equitable estates. These estate acts enabled individuals and families to sell, mortgage, lease, exchange, and improve land previously bound by inheritance rules and other legal legacies. The loosening of...

Bedevilling the ongoing debate about changes in real-incomes in late-medieval western Europe, especially during the so-called ‘Golden Age of the Labourer’, is the very troubling issue of ‘wage-stickiness’. The standard and long-traditional explanation for this supposed ‘Golden Age’...

This paper revisits, modifies, and combines elements of three major ‘institutional’ international-trade models, none of which has yet fully received the attention that it deserves, to provide a new explanation for the growth, decline, and then rebirth of internationally-oriented fairs in the...

This paper analyses the major changes in textile products, production costs, prices, and market orientations during the era when the ‘draperies’ or cloth industries of the late-medieval Low Countries and England had become increasingly dependent upon northern markets and the German Hanseatic...

The establishment of a centralized government bureaucracy to collect taxes is regarded as one of the essential features of a modern economy. Britain has long been regarded as a pioneer, creating an efficient tax-collecting bureaucracy over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the other...

The infrastructure sector has the potential to generate wide differences in profits and economic outcomes. This paper examines financial returns and investment strategies for Britain’s turnpike roads in the early nineteenth century. There are three main findings. First, rates of return on...

Between 1700 and 1870 Britain's transport sector improved dramatically. This paper surveys the literature on Britain’s transport revolution and examines its contribution to economic growth during the Industrial Revolution. It reviews the important infrastructural and technological...

The window tax provides a dramatic and transparent historical example of the potential distorting effects of taxation. Imposed in England in 1696, the tax—a kind of predecessor of the modern property tax—was levied on dwellings with the tax liability based on the number of windows. The tax...