Accounting and Finance Research Community – Professor Graeme Acheson

Title: Business Partnerships in a British Industrial City: The Case of Glasgow 1861-1881

Date: 6 December  2023

Time: 13:00-14:00

Location: FDC.1.18

Speaker: Professor Graeme Acheson

If you would like to attend, please register using the following link:

Business Partnerships in a British Industrial City: The Case of Glasgow 1861-1881

Professor Graeme Acheson is Professor of Finance at Strathclyde University, where he is Head of Department for Accounting and Finance. Graeme’s research applies contemporary econometric techniques to historical settings. Much of his work examines how the evolving legal environment in nineteenth century Great Britain impacted on investor behaviour and governance structures in early British companies. His research has been funded by bodies such as The Leverhulme Trust and The British Academy, and he has published in journals including The Review of Financial Studies, The Economic History Review and The Journal of Economic History.

Abstract

This paper examines the prevalence of business partnerships in a late nineteenth century British city. Focusing on Glasgow, we build a detailed picture of their number and type, the entrepreneurs who ran them, and how the businesses persisted during an important period of industrial growth. We show that partnerships were a key business grouping in the city, more numerous than suggested by other recent studies, and that many of these businesses had numbers of employees which made then amongst the largest businesses in Britain. We find evidence that partnerships during this period persisted equally as well as corporations, and that kinship partnerships might have been able to deal better with the hold-up problems associated with the partnership form. Finally, linking census data to our population of business owners, we show that younger residents and migrants were proportionately less well represented amongst business partners.