Corporate ownership and control in Victorian Britain

Using ownership and control data for 890 firm‐years, this article examines the concentration of capital and voting rights in British companies in the second half of the nineteenth century. We find that both capital and voting rights were diffuse by modern‐day standards. However, this does not necessarily mean that there was a modern‐style separation of ownership from control in Victorian Britain. One major implication of our findings is that diffuse ownership was present in the UK much earlier than previously thought, and given that it occurred in an era with weak shareholder protection law, it somewhat undermines the influential law and finance hypothesis. We also find that diffuse ownership is correlated with large boards, a London head office, non‐linear voting rights, and shares traded on multiple markets.

Intermarriage in a Divided Society: Ireland a Century Ago

This paper explores the characteristics associated with marriages between Roman Catholics and members of other religious denominations in Ireland before the Great War. Using the entire digitized returns of the 1911 population census, we find that such marriages were relatively rare, occurring in less than one percent of total marriages. Some of this infrequency can be attributed to ethno-religious hostility-especially in the north of the country. However, we also show that the rarity of intermarriage reflects local marriage markets, as non-Roman Catholics living in communities with fewer coreligionists were more likely to intermarry. We examine the individual characteristics of partners in these marriages, looking at the religious denomination of their children, their decision to marry out, and their fertility behavior. Our findings illustrate how the frequency of intermarriage reflects historical levels of intolerance, but only after local marriage market conditions have been accounted for.

Empirical testing of genuine savings as an indicator of weak sustainability: a three-country analysis of long run trends

Genuine Savings has emerged as a widely used indicator of sustainable development. In this paper, we use long -term data stretching back to 1870 to undertake empirical tests of the relationship between Genuine Savings (GS) and future well-being for three countries: Britain, the USA and Germany. Our tests are based on an underlying theoretical relationship between GS and changes in the present value of future consumption. Based on both single country and panel results, we find evidence supporting the existence of javascript:void(0);a cointegrating (long run equilibrium) relationship between GS and future well-being, and fail to reject the basic theoretical result on the relationship between these two macroeconomic variables. This provides some support for the GS measure of weak sustainability.

Corporate Ownership, Control, and Firm Performance in Victorian Britain

Scholars have long debated whether ownership structure matters for firm performance. The standard view with respect to Victorian Britain is that family-controlled companies had a detrimental effect on operating profit and shareholder value. Here, we examine this view using a hand-collected corporate ownership dataset. Our main finding is that it was not necessarily the broad structure of corporate ownership that mattered for performance, but whether family blockholders had a governance role. Large active blockholders tended to increase operating performance, implying that they reduced managerial agency problems. In contrast, we find that directors who were independent of large family owners were more likely to increase shareholder value.

Max Weber and the First World War: Protestant and Catholic living standards in Germany, 1915-1919

We assess informal institutions of Protestants and Catholics by investigating their economic
resilience in a natural experiment. The First World War constitutes an exogenous shock to living standards since the duration and intensity of the war exceeded all expectations. We assess the ability of Protestant and Catholic communities to cope with increasing food prices and wartime black markets. Literature based on Weber (1904, 1905) suggests that Protestants must be more resilient than their Catholic peers. Using individual height data on some 2,800 Germans to assess levels of malnutrition during the war, we find that living standards for both Protestants and Catholics declined; however, the decrease of Catholics’ height was disproportionately large. Our empirical analysis finds a large statistically significant difference between Protestants and Catholics for the 1914-19 birth cohort, and we argue that this height gap cannot be attributed to socioeconomic background and fertility alone.

Integration between the London and New York Stock Exchanges, 1825-1925

The integration between the London and New York Stock Exchanges is analyzed during the era when they were still developing as asset markets. The domestic securities on both exchanges showed little sustained integration, even when controlling for the different characteristics of stocks, implying that the pricing of securities in the US and UK were still being driven by local factors. However, there was considerable integration between New York and those listings on London which operated internationally. These results place a limit on the view that pre-World War I was the first era of globalization in terms of capital markets, and suggest that the listing of foreign securities may be one of the primary mechanisms driving asset market integration.

Immigration and the demand for life insurance: evidence from Canada, 1911

This article analyses the determinants of the demand for life insurance using sample data from the 1911 Census of Canada. We find that immigrants' demand for life insurance was on average around 13 percentage points lower than that of native-born Canadians, with the effect varying by province of settlement. We interpret these findings as evidence suggesting a greater appetite for risk among self-selecting immigrants relative to native-born Canadians. We also uncover evidence of a slow assimilation of immigrants in terms of life insurance holdings, slower indeed than the process of assimilation in terms of earnings.

Women of an uncertain age: quantifying human capital accumulation in rural Ireland in the nineteenth century

Geary and Stark find that Ireland’s post-Famine per capita GDP converged with British levels, and that this convergence was largely due to total factor productivity growth rather than mass emigration. In this article, new long-run measurements of human capital accumulation in Ireland are devised in order to facilitate a better assessment of sources of this productivity growth, including the relative contribution of men and women. This is done by exploiting the frequency at which age data heap at round ages, widely interpreted as an indicator of a population’s basic numeracy skills. Because Földvári, van Leeuwen, and van Leeuwen-Li find that gender-specific trends in this measure derived from census returns are biased by who is reporting and recording the age information, any computed numeracy trends are corrected using data from prison and workhouse registers, sources in which women ostensibly self-reported their age. The findings show that rural Irish women born early in the nineteenth century had substantially lower levels of human capital than uncorrected census data would otherwise suggest. These results are large in magnitude and thus economically significant. The speed at which women converged is consistent with Geary and Stark’s interpretation of Irish economic history; Ireland probably graduated to Europe’s club of advanced economies thanks in part to rapid advances in female human capital.

What Moved Share Prices in the Nineteenth-Century London Stock Market?

Using a new weekly blue-chip index, this paper investigates the causes of stock price movements on the London market between 1823 and 1870. We find that economic fundamentals explain about 15 per cent of weekly and 34 per cent of monthly variation in share prices. Contemporary press reporting from the London Stock Exchange is used to ascertain what market participants thought were causing the largest movements on the market. The vast majority of large movements were attributed by the press to geopolitical, monetary, railway-sector, and financial-crisis news. Investigating the stock price changes on an independent list of events reaffirms these findings, suggesting that the most important specific events which moved markets were wars involving European powers.

Welcome to the Occupation: Patterns in the Management of the Fourteenth-Century English Landscape

Occupation of the landscape took many different forms and is one of the predominant ways of viewing settlement within the medieval world. Buildings are the most effective method of occupying space, both physically and psychologically. This paper will draw on current research into fourteenth century manorial buildings in England and explore how they were used to occupy both the landscape and the communities associated with them.