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This article explores the financing of early industrial corporations using newly constructed panel data from Imperial Russian balance sheets. We document how corporate capital structures and dividend payout policies reflected internal agency issues, information asymmetries with external investors, life cycle considerations, and other frictions present in the Russian context. In particular, we find that widely held, listed and more profitable corporations were less reliant on debt financing. Asset tangibility was associated with lower debt levels, suggesting that Russian corporate debt was short-term, collateral was largely irrelevant, or agency problems dominated. Finally, we find that many of these same issues, for example ownership structure and access to securities markets, also mattered for financial performance and that dividends may have compensated investors for poor legal protections.
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The Births, Lives and Deaths of Corporations in Late Imperial Russia
Abstract Enterprise creation, destruction and evolution support the transition to modern economic growth, yet these processes are poorly understood in industrialising contexts. We investigate Imperial Russia's industrial development at the firm level by examining entry, exit and persistence of corporations. Relying on newly developed balance sheet panel data from every non-financial Russian corporation (more than 2,500 of them) between 1899 and 1914, we examine the characteristics of entering and exiting corporations, how new entrants evolved and the impact of founder identity on subsequent outcomes. Russian corporations evolved within a market environment, conditional on overcoming distortionary institutional barriers to entry that slowed the emergence of these leading firms in the Imperial economy.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1658877
- PAR ID:
- 10515911
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Economic Journal
- Volume:
- 134
- Issue:
- 661
- ISSN:
- 0013-0133
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 2041-2070
- Size(s):
- p. 2041-2070
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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