The Economic Effects of the English Parliamentary Enclosures

The re-organization and rationalization of rural property rights has been argued to be a key stimulant to agricultural productivity, potentially feeding into broader processes of development and structural change. In this paper we study the impact of one mechanism that created modern individualized property rights in England, “Parliamentary enclosure”, initiated by Parliament between 1750 and 1830. In our main estimates we exploit a feature of the Parliamentary enclosure process as a source of exogenous variation and find that such enclosures were associated with significantly higher crop yields and land inequality. We also find that Parliamentary enclosures were connected to increased innovation, improved farming practices and infrastructure and a shift out of agriculture and towards industry. They also released labor which flowed primarily to northern industrializing regions. Our results do not suggest that previous systems of collective governance were able to efficiently manage commonly managed resources.