Shareholder Democracy Under Autocracy: Voting Rights and Corporate Performance in Imperial Russia

This paper investigates how the rules that corporations wrote for themselves related to their financing and performance in an environment characterized by poor investor protections, Imperial Russia. We present new data on detailed governance provisions from Imperial Russian corporate charters, which we connect to a comprehensive panel database of corporate balance sheets from 1899 to 1914. This investigation reveals the tradeoffs weighed by Imperial Russian corporations and demonstrates the surprising flexibility that Russian corporations enjoyed, conditional on obtaining a corporate charter.
Amanda Gregg is Associate Professor of Economics at Middlebury College. She joined Middlebury in 2015 after completing her Ph.D. in Economics at Yale University. Her research concerns industrial development, productivity, and commercial law in Late Imperial Russia. Recent publications include “Factory Productivity and the Concession System of Incorporation in Late Imperial Russia" in the American Economic Review and “Capital Structure and Corporate Performance in Late Imperial Russia” with Steven Nafziger in the European Review of Economic History.