Assessable stock and the Comstock mining companies

Glenda Oskar

Business History, 2023, vol. 65, issue 1, 157-185

Abstract: Historically, it was common for companies to issue assessable stock. With assessable stock, a company’s board of directors could request additional payments beyond the initial stock price. Typically, shareholders forfeited their stock ownership if assessments remained unpaid; defaulted shares were sold at auction. This form of securitization became popular in extractive industries, such as gold and silver mining. In this article, I provide a description of its legal history and a detailed case study of large companies with mining claims on the Comstock lode between 1860 and 1877, considered an exemplar of successful mine development with assessable stock. I also examine several hypotheses used to explain the practice of issuing assessable stock, such as limiting agency and information costs.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00076791.2020.1807951 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:bushst:v:65:y:2023:i:1:p:157-185

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FBSH20

DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2020.1807951

Access Statistics for this article

Business History is currently edited by Professor John Wilson and Professor Steven Toms

More articles in Business History from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().