Capital structure and corporate performance in late Imperial Russia

This article investigates the financing of corporations in industrialization’s early stages by examining new balance sheet data describing all Imperial Russian corporations in 1914. We emphasize differences between two Russian corporation types: share partnerships and A-corporations. Share partnerships issued greater dividends, were less likely to issue bonds, and had larger accounts payable. We find that capital structures varied with age, size, and sector according to modern corporate finance theories and that scaled profits did not demonstrate differential market power across corporation types. Thus, Russian corporations exhibited considerable financial flexibility, and reducing incorporation costs could have benefited the Imperial Russian economy.