Fixed Rent Contracts in English Agriculture, 1750-1850: A Conjecture

David R Stead

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of York

Abstract: This article conjectures a parsimonious explanation for the choice of fixed cash rent contracts in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English agriculture. Tenant farmers, it is suggested, bore the brunt of the income risk because they were less risk averse than landowners. The latter's acute risk aversion may have been produced by acute loss aversion brought about by their substantial fixed liabilities, part of which arose from signalling status. Limited quantitative evidence that landlords gave their tenants a risk premium, in the form of a low rent, is presented. Landowners apparently did not make especially frequent use of the formal short-term credit market as an alternative means of smoothing income, perhaps because the transactions costs of doing so were non-trivial.

New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.york.ac.uk/media/economics/documents/discussionpapers/2005/0501.pdf Main text (application/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:yor:yorken:05/01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of York Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Paul Hodgson ().