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

This talk was based on a paper written by Amanda Gregg (co-authored with Amy Dayton and Steven Nafziger). The 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.