Shares, Coalition Formation and Political Development: Evidence from Seventeenth Century England

Saumitra Jha

Research Papers from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business

Abstract: A key challenge for developing societies is to build coalitions across disparate interests in favour of beneficial policies. This paper documents the role of a financial innovation-- shares--in aligning disparate interests in favour of representative government during England's Civil War (1642-48). Using novel micro-data, the paper shows that shareholding was a major determinant of support for political reform by members of parliament. The paper suggests that shares allowed a broad spectrum of investors to benefit from new opportunities overseas. However, overseas rights belonged chiefly to the executive. Thus the introduction of shares aligned incentives in favour of political reforms and overseas policies crucial for growth.

JEL-codes: F10 K00 N13 O10 O43 P10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/RP2005.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecl:stabus:2005

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Papers from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().