The Economic Effects of the English Parliamentary Enclosures / Leander Heldring, James A. Robinson, Sebastian Vollmer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Heldring, Leander.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Robinson, James A.

Vollmer, Sebastian.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w29772.

NBER working paper series no. w29772

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2022.

Summary:

We use a dataset of the entire population of English Parliamentary enclosure acts between 1750 and 1830 to provide the first evidence of their impact. Parliamentary enclosure led to the systematic rationalization of traditional property rights. Exploiting a feature of the Parliamentary process that produced such legislation as a source of exogenous variation, we show that such enclosures were associated with significantly higher crop yields, but also higher land inequality. Our results are in line with a literature going back to Arthur Young and Karl Marx on the effects of Parliamentary enclosure on productivity and inequality. They do not support the argument that informal systems of governance, even in small, cohesive, and stable communities, were able to efficiently allocate commonly used and governed resources.

Notes:

Print version record

February 2022.