Collaborative Research: RUI: Corporate Law, Finance, and Productivity in Historical Perspective

本研究研究工业和金融发展的法律的和体制基础。商法、合同法、企业法和公司法的具体规定可能对企业的组织和融资方式产生重大影响，并对社会经济发展的速度和结构产生影响。研究人员研究了20世纪初俄罗斯帝国的案例，因为它提供了独特的高质量数据和一组特定的法律的和金融特征，所有这些都使研究工业化经济中公司法，财务和公司绩效之间的关系成为可能。该项目收集和分析新的数据集，同时在统计和研究方法方面培训大量的本科研究助理。该项目涉及收集和分析1917年十月革命前俄罗斯企业的企业级数据。数据收集范围是国际性的，借鉴了原始的公司章程，公司和金融市场的档案记录，以及大量的历史报纸，政府报告，以及从美国，俄罗斯和欧洲的档案馆和图书馆挑选的其他材料。新的数据集将管理单个公司的法律的规则与其随后的财务特征、生产率和市场估值联系起来。作为该项目的一部分生成的公开数据库对不同领域的学者感兴趣，如公司法，金融，经济史，经济地理，工业组织和俄罗斯历史。俄罗斯帝国的背景不仅为发展中经济体提供了独一无二的高质量数据，而且还提供了公司法律的结构以及基础金融和工业条件的重大变化。这使得计量经济学评估的因果假设，企业如何融资，以及如何俄罗斯帝国的法律的和经济机构的运作。因此，这一历史性的项目说明了法律的机构、公司治理和金融在经济发展过程中所起的作用。该项目的调查结果对于了解俄罗斯联邦当前法律的和经济状况的历史背景是非常重要的，这是美国当前政策关注的一个领域。这项研究涉及本科研究助理在每个阶段。这些学生学习数据编码方法，获得估计计量经济模型的技能，熟悉广泛的跨学科奖学金，并获得使用俄语来源的经验。指导本科生符合两个主要研究者的主要本科院校的目标。

This research studies the legal and institutional foundations of industrial and financial development. The particulars of commercial, contract, enterprise, and corporate law can have major consequences for how firms are organized and financed, with repercussions for the pace and structure of economic development in a society. The investigators examine the case of the Russian Empire around the turn of the twentieth century, because it offers a combination of uniquely high quality data and a particular set of legal and financial characteristics, all of which make it possible to study the relationships among company law, finance, and firm performance in an industrializing economy. This project collects and analyzes the new dataset while training a large number of undergraduate research assistants in statistical and research methods. This project involves the collection and analysis of firm-level data describing Russian corporations before the October Revolution of 1917. The data collection is international in scope, drawing on original corporate charters, archival records of firms and financial markets, and a wealth of historical newspapers, government reports, and other materials culled from archives and libraries in the United States, Russia, and Europe. The new dataset links the legal rules governing individual corporations to their subsequent financial characteristics, productivity, and market valuations. The publicly-available databases generated as part of the project are of interest to scholars in diverse fields such as corporate law, finance, economic history, economic geography, industrial organization, and Russian history. The Imperial Russian setting not only offers data of uniquely high quality for a developing economy, but it also provides substantial variation in the legal structures of corporations and in the underlying financial and industrial conditions. This enables the econometric evaluation of causal hypotheses regarding how corporations were financed and how Imperial Russian legal and economic institutions functioned. Thus, this historical project speaks to the role that legal institutions, corporate governance, and finance play in the process of economic development. The project's findings are salient for understanding the historical context of current legal and economic conditions in the Russian Federation, an area of current U.S. policy concern. This research involves undergraduate research assistants at every stage. These students learn methods of data coding, acquire skills in estimating econometric models, become conversant with a broad and interdisciplinary scholarship, and gain experience working with Russian-language sources. Mentoring undergraduates aligns with goals of both principal investigators' primarily undergraduate institutions.