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

本研究研究产业和金融发展的法律和制度基础。商法、合同法、企业法和公司法的细节可能对公司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。调查人员研究了二十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套特定的法律和金融特征的组合，所有这些都使研究工业化经济中公司法、金融和公司业绩之间的关系成为可能。该项目在收集和分析新的数据集的同时，对大量的本科生研究助理进行了统计和研究方法的培训。这个项目涉及收集和分析描述1917年十月革命前俄罗斯公司的公司级数据。数据收集的范围是国际的，利用了原始的公司章程、公司和金融市场的档案记录，以及从美国、俄罗斯和欧洲的档案和图书馆中挑选出来的大量历史报纸、政府报告和其他材料。新的数据集将管理单个公司的法律规则与它们随后的财务特征、生产率和市场估值联系起来。作为该项目的一部分，作为该项目的一部分而产生的公开数据库引起了不同领域的学者的兴趣，如公司法、金融、经济史、经济地理学、产业组织和俄罗斯历史。俄罗斯帝国的背景不仅为一个发展中的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结构以及基本金融和工业条件的巨大差异。这使得能够对有关企业如何融资以及俄罗斯帝国法律和经济机构如何运作的因果假设进行计量经济学评估。因此，这个历史性的项目说明了法律制度、公司治理和金融在经济发展过程中所发挥的作用。该项目的发现对于了解俄罗斯联邦当前法律和经济状况的历史背景具有重要意义，俄罗斯联邦是美国当前政策关注的一个领域。这项研究涉及每个阶段的本科生研究助理。这些学生学习数据编码的方法，获得估计计量经济学模型的技能，熟悉广泛的跨学科学术知识，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机构主要是本科院校的目标。

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.