Topic: Financing Industrialization in Imperial Russia: Insights from Newly Collected Firm-Level Data
Abstract:
This presentation provides an overview of my research on the performance, governance, and financial structure of Russian partnerships and corporations around the turn of the twentieth century. In this period, the Imperial Russian economy grew rapidly and experienced considerable structural change. Large, limited liability corporations played a key role in the economy’s development. This research seeks to understand how such companies wrote governance rules that attracted domestic and foreign investors and how these companies used that capital to finance productivity-enhancing machines in their industrial establishments. Results are based on new databases of firm-level data collected from Imperial Russian sources. The project may have important lessons for modern-day countries undergoing rapid industrialization involving large-scale enterprises. Parts of this research are supported by the National Science Foundation. Middlebury undergraduate research assistants have provided exemplary research assistance.
Biography:
Amanda Gregg joined the Middlebury College Department of Economics in the fall of 2015 after completing her Ph.D. in Economics at Yale University. She also holds a B.S. in Mathematics-Economics and a B.Phil in History from the University of Pittsburgh.
Amanda’s fields are economic history and economic development, and her research concerns industrial development, productivity, and commercial law in Late Imperial Russia. For her research on the Russian industrial sector, she has constructed a large database of Russian manufacturing establishments using Russian data from 1894, 1900, and 1908. Attending the Davis School of Russian at Middlebury in the summer of 2008 proved crucial to her research.