TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hilt, Eric
TI  - Corporation Law and the Shift toward Open Access in the Antebellum United States
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 21195
PY  - 2015
Y2  - May 2015
DO  - 10.3386/w21195
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21195
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21195.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Eric Hilt
Wellesley College
Department of Economics
106 Central Street
Wellesley, MA 02481
Tel: 781/283-2986
Fax: 781/283-2177
E-Mail: ehilt@wellesley.edu
M1  - published as Eric Hilt. "Corporation Law and the Shift toward Open Access in the Antebellum United States," in Naomi R. Lamoreaux and John Joseph Wallis, editors, "Organizations, Civil Society, and the Roots of Development" University of Chicago Press (2017)

M3  - presented at "Organizations, Civil Society, & the Roots of Dev,", October 24-25, 2014
AB  - This paper analyses the general incorporation statutes for manufacturing firms adopted by the American states up to 1860.  Prior to the enactment of a general law, a business could only incorporate by obtaining a special act of their state legislature; general statutes facilitated incorporation through a routine administrative procedure.  A new chronology of the adoption of these statutes reveals that several states enacted them much earlier than previous scholarship has indicated.  An analysis of the contents of these laws indicates that many imposed strict regulations on the corporations they created, whereas others granted entrepreneurs near-total freedom. Many Southern states enacted particularly liberal statutes, but sometimes also prohibited nonwhites from incorporating businesses or gave a government official discretion over access to the law.  Finally, an analysis of the volume of incorporation through special charters reveals that the states that failed to adopt general incorporation laws tended to offer unusually generous access to incorporation through special legislative acts.  Taken together, these results imply that the adoption of a general incorporation statute did not always represent a discrete transition to open access to the corporate form.  Instead, general statutes sometimes included highly restrictive provisions governing access, and some states generously accommodated demands for incorporation in the absence of a general statute.
ER  -