This article analyses the relationship between guilds and information asymmetries using a large database of quality disputes from early modern Italy. It finds that a high‐quality urban textile industry was able to solve externalities using a range of ex ante and ex post monitoring mechanisms based on private market relationships and fair sanctions which effectively reduced adverse selection and information asymmetries. Instead, when guilds did use their quality regulations, the effect of the guild on information asymmetries and the industry as a whole was generally negative, by providing mechanisms that could be manipulated by entrenched interest groups for rent‐seeking purposes.

SUMMARY: This article aims to understand norms and values pertaining to the definition of just wages in early modern Italy. The starting point is the treatise by the jurist Lanfranco Zacchia, De Salario seu Operariorum Mercede, which appeared in the mid-seventeenth century and represented the first attempt to collate a set of rules on wages based on the traditions of Roman and canon law. After a brief presentation of the treatise, I shall analyse the meanings and concepts of wages, and then consider the elements that determined the just wage. To understand how prescriptions were seen by individuals, I shall also compare them with information about court cases and rulings compiled by Zacchia in another book, the Centuria decisionum ad materiam Tractatus de Salario, and with the rest of the existing literature. Evidence from my comparison will allow us to understand the interaction and reciprocal influences between juridical thought and daily work practice, and underline the fact that wages were based on a complex system of norms and values where individuals, their social positions, skills, and experience determined the recognition of the just wage with reference to the local context.

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The history of work in the modern era has -often unfairly -considered children's work to be a minor aspect of the household, if not « complementary » to the economic activities unfolding within it. While the traditional garzonato [apprenticeship] represented a formative stage of an adolescent's life, geared toward learning a trade that would be practiced in adulthood, other work done outside of a trade career was considered -often incorrectly -as « minor » and as a mere response to a family's economic or structural dificulties. As a result the wages of pueri, that is children between the ages of 7 and 14, were usually considered « supplementary » to the household budget in relation to the wages of more adult workers, and thus stripped of their individual nature. However, research on certain Italian and European cities has enabled a partial revision of these interpretations, offering a broader framework for the causes and signiicance of children's work in modern times. Drawing on the proceedings from a number of central and northern Italian civil and business courts (Padua, Florence, Vicenza, Milan), cross-checked with a large body of notarial acts, this paper seeks to show how children's wages played a role that went beyond just remunerating work or supplementing family income. In fact, wages were primarily a means to ensure the temporal continuity of a relationship of debt and credit between two or more people, allowing the children -and their respective parents and guardians -to enter into relationships with other individuals and build social as well as economic ties that might prove useful in the future. Second, children's wages were not set according to a 'standard', but rather relected apprentices' individual characteristics, which were primarily deined by the characteristics of their biological family. Finally, by earning wages these children were able to begin a long process of integration into ancien régime society. On the basis of these and other elements this paper proposes to critically discuss the nature, role and function of children's wages in modern times.

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