“The Economic Effects of the English Parliamentary Enclosures”, Leander Heldring, James A. Robinson, Sebastian Vollmer2022-02 (economics)⁠:

We use a dataset of the entire population of English Parliamentary enclosure acts 1750^–₈₀1830_194ya 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 statistically-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.

See Also:

• The Long-Run Impact of the Dissolution of the English Monasteries

• Geography and Agricultural Productivity: Cross-Country Evidence from Micro Plot-Level Data

• A theory of the pre-modern British aristocracy

• Does insecure land tenure deter investment? Evidence from a randomized controlled trial