The Economic Effects of the English Parliamentary Enclosures

Leander Heldring, James Robinson and Sebastian Vollmer

No 29772, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: 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.

JEL-codes: D01 N5 O43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-his and nep-pke
Note: DAE POL
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