[17 July] The 178th Osaka Workshop on Economics of Institutions and Organizations/ Chiaki Yamamoto (Graduate School of Economics, The University of Osaka)

Presenter: Chiaki Yamamoto (Graduate School of Economics, The University of Osaka)
Title: “Legal Infrastructure and Urban Development: Evidence from Attorney Density in England, c. 1790-1851” (joint with Masaki Hattori)

Date: Friday, 17 July 2026, 13:30–15:00
Venue: Only in-person at Conference Room, 6th floor, Osaka School of International Public Policy Building, Toyonaka Campus

Registration: Please email Ms. Kitabayashi (yuri-kitabayashi [at] iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp)

Abstract: This paper examines whether local legal infrastructure contributed to urban development in England during the first half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on attorneys as providers of legal services, contract enforcement, debt recovery, conveyancing, and commercial intermediation, it asks whether towns with higher concentrations of attorneys in the 1790s followed distinctive trajectories of demographic and occupational change by 1851. We construct a new town-level dataset from the Universal British Directory, published in 1791–98, currently covering 455 towns and to be extended to the full set of 480 towns. We link this dataset to population data for 1801 and 1851 and to occupational information from the Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM). Preliminary results suggest that, after controlling for initial town size, higher attorney density in 1801 is associated with more complex occupational structures in 1851. This finding contributes to a broader view of urbanisation in which town growth was not driven only by industrialisation and the rise of manufacturing centres. Towns also grew by performing traditional urban functions, including reducing transaction costs in commerce, credit, property transfer, and local administration. Although the present analysis remains preliminary and does not yet claim definitive causality, it offers new evidence on the relationship between local legal services, institutional infrastructure, and uneven urban development in industrialising England.

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The meeting is organized in collaboration with International Public Policy Seminar