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

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Amanda Gregg (Middlebury College), co-authored with Amy Dayton (Strider Technologies) and Steven Nafziger (Williams College)
• Wednesday 06 March 2024, 13:15-14:45
• Board Room (Faculty of History) and on Zoom.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Aleksandra Dul.

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. We document how variation in votes per share and other shareholder rights provisions were related to corporate choices of using debt vs. equity and whether these governance provisions correlated systematically with performance measures on the balance sheet and in terms of the market-to-book ratio. 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.

The seminar meets Wednesdays at 1:15 pm in the History Faculty and online on Zoom https://zoom.us/j/96176307098?pwd=aHNlWEZ4SHd1a0MrVkpUQ05aZVFuUT09

This talk is part of the Quantitative History Seminar series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• Board Room (Faculty of History) and on Zoom
• Department of Geography
• Economic and Social History Seminars
• Quantitative History Seminar
• history

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.