ABSTRACT
The annual number of new limited companies registered in England increased secularly at a faster rate from the 1880s. 1 It is difficult to establish when this new trend set in because of institutional factors, since both the trend during the 1890s and the 1900s and the cyclical deviations from it were distorted to a significant degree by the impending major reform of company law. It was evident to those who sought to establish new companies in the 1890s that company formations in future would be more strictly regulated once the law was reformed. This was clear from the government bills of 1888 and 1895 and the considerations of both the Davey Committee of 1895 and the House of Lords Committees of the second half of the 1890s which reviewed the latter bill. 2 Consequently there was a widespread attempt during the 1890s to take advantage of the permissive legislation of 1862 while it was still available. Such forestalling registrations magnified both the cyclical upswing in registrations of the 1890s and the following cyclical downswing of the 1900s. This distorted the cyclical movement to such an extent that the pattern of regular fluctuations in annual registrations, each with a length of eight to nine years, was broken after the 1890s. The next cyclical peak in company registrations following the upper turning point of 1898 did not occur in 1906 but in 1910.
