Wife Sales

This working paper entitled "Wife Sales" by some Mercatus Center scholars has (obviously) attracted some attention on places like a Forbes blog and other econ blogs, such as the Freakonomics blog. Give it a read or at least a perusal in order to get past the initial shock of the title and perhaps see what they are trying to say.

Here's the Abstract:

For over a century English husbands sold their wives at public auctions. We argue
that wife sales were indirect Coasean divorce bargains that permitted wives to buy the
right to exit marriage from their husbands in a legal environment that denied them
the property rights required to buy that right directly. Wife-sale auctions identifi…ed
"suitors"--men who valued unhappy wives more than their current husbands, who
unhappy wives valued more than their current husbands, and who had the property
rights required to buy unhappy wives' right to exit marriage from their husbands. These
suitors enabled spouses in inefficient marriages to dissolve their marriages where direct
Coasean divorce bargains between them were impossible. Wife sales were an efficiency-
enhancing institutional response to the unusual constellation of property rights that
Industrial Revolution-era English law created. They made husbands, suitors, and wives
better off.