This article explores the financing of early industrial corporations using newly constructed panel data from Imperial Russian balance sheets. We document how corporate capital structures and dividend payout policies reflected internal agency issues, information asymmetries with external investors, life cycle considerations, and other frictions present in the Russian context. In particular, we find that widely held, listed and more profitable corporations were less reliant on debt financing. Asset tangibility was associated with lower debt levels, suggesting that Russian corporate debt was short-term, collateral was largely irrelevant, or agency problems dominated. Finally, we find that many of these same issues, for example ownership structure and access to securities markets, also mattered for financial performance and that dividends may have compensated investors for poor legal protections.

“Capitalism,” etymologists say, is rooted neither in Adam Smith nor in Karl Marx but in The Newcomes, a long-forgotten novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, in which a fallen French nobleman regains his dignity when the rising price of railway shares restores his “sense of capitalism” (Project Gutenberg ebook edition, p. 1016). It's one of those you-know-it-when-you-see-it kinds of words, meaningful mainly when set against “socialism,” a word first used in the 1820s to describe collective ownership of property. Capitalism has taken on all sorts of meanings since Thackeray coined the term in 1854, describing everything from the repression of miners by late-nineteenth-century robber barons to the venture-capital-fertilized blossoming of Silicon Valley. The three histories discussed in this essay all address its meaning in the modern world economy. None believes that future capitalism will be like capitalisms past.

This article examines the growth of the waste and recycling sector in Sweden since the 1970s and seeks to identify the conditions for market growth and underlying business dynamics. The article identifies a slow growth pattern at aggregate level in the 1970s, while a major shift toward higher growth rates took place only in the mid-1990s. Resembling the findings of existing studies of German and US industry counterparts, Swedish recycling companies grew larger in the 1970s and more knowledge-intensive from the 1980s. Our study concludes that the growth of the Swedish recycling industry has been driven not only by government policies addressing household waste but even more so by large manufacturing firms that have increasingly demanded more complex recycling services over time.

General Electric and Jack Welch are dead. Now they belong to the ages, which means they are the property of historians. What are we to make of them?

Journalism has been called the first draft of history, and under review here are two books by journalists: Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric by Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann and The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles.

Few phrases in the discourse of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have proven as durable and pliable as “seeking truth from facts.” The phrase was first used by Mao Zedong in the 1930s as a way to legitimate the CCP's departure from Stalinist direction, and it was later mobilized by Deng Xiaoping to signal a shift from Maoism toward new avenues of policy experimentation. In recent years, as rising tensions in the US-China relationship have produced a burgeoning literature that seeks to understand and interpret Beijing's intentions for a Western audience, the phrase has become as applicable to the study of China as it has long been to the governance of China. This is not merely because the People's Republic of China (PRC) provides an endless source of raw material for speculation and analysis, obscured behind a veil of obfuscation, censorship, and propaganda constructed by the world's largest and most powerful political party. It is also because the stakes of the debate—coming at a time when the role of the West in general, and the United States in particular, has been thrown into doubt by social division, political dysfunction, and economic decline—seem to provide grounds for doubting the motives of anyone who aspires to take a stand on such a crucial yet ambiguous question as the true nature of CCP rule. With so many facts to choose from, how are we to know which will produce the right truths, and more importantly, who is doing the choosing and why?