Insights on Imperial Russian Industrialization from Newly Collected Firm-Level Data

press release: 

(Refreshments starting at 3:45) Room 206, Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive

About the lecture: This presentation will summarize Gregg’s recent research on Imperial Russian commercial law, finance, and industrial productivity. By the early twentieth century, the Imperial Russian economy still lagged behind Western European levels of development but was growing rapidly. Gregg’s larger project seeks to understand how the Imperial government's industrial policies, for example restricting the creation of large corporations, affected the development of the Russian industrial sector.  Results are obtained from two large databases describing individual firms in the Russian Empire: one describes all industrial firms in 1894, 1900, and 1908, and another describes every corporation on an annual basis from 1900 to 1914. With this new data, some classic, stubborn questions can now be answered.  For example, results demonstrate that Russia's concession system of incorporation held back industrial development and that, conditional on obtaining a corporate charter, Russian corporations behaved reasonably competitively.

About the speaker: 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. She studied the Russian language at the University of Pittsburgh, while studying abroad in Moscow, and at Middlebury College's summer Russian School. Her research concerns industrial development, productivity, and commercial law in Late Imperial Russia. For her research on the Russian industrial sector, she has constructed several large databases describing individual firms. For her dissertation research, she constructed large database of Russian manufacturing establishments using Russian data from 1894, 1900, and 1908.  Recently, she has been working with co-author Steven Nafziger of Williams College to compose several large databases describing the financing, governance, and performance of Imperial Russian corporations.