Determinants of Railroad Capital Structure, 1830-1885

U.S. Railroads suffered repeated financial crises in the 19th and 20th Centuries. These crises were caused by a combination of high debt levels and strongly procyclical revenues and profits. Given the inherent instability of profits, why did railroads depend primarily on debt to finance their initial growth? I find that, over 1830-1885, railroads faced significant agency and control problems, which were partially mitigated by the use of debt. Around 1885, new developments reinforced the initial tendency towards debt-heavy capital structures.

Corruption and Reform: An Introduction

The United States today, according to most studies, is among the least corrupt nations in the world. But America's past was checkered with political scandal and widespread corruption that would not seem unusual compared with the most corrupt developing nation today. We construct a "corruption and fraud index" using word counts from a large number of newspapers for 1815 to 1975, supplemented with other historical facts. The index reveals that America experienced a substantial decrease in corruption from 1870 to 1920, particularly from the late-1870s to the mid-1880s and again in the 1910s. At its peak in the 1870s the "corruption and fraud index" is about five times its level from the end of the Progressive Era to the 1970s. If the United States was once considerably more corrupt than it is today, then America's history should offer lessons about how to reduce corruption. How did America become a less corrupt polity, economy, and society? We review the findings and insights from a series of essays for a conference volume, Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's History, for which this paper is the introduction that attempt to understand the remarkable evolution of corruption and reform in U.S. history.

Corporate Governance and the Plight of Minority Shareholders in the United States Before the Great Depression

Legal records indicate that conflicts of interest -- that is, situations in which officers and directors were in a position to benefit themselves at the expense of minority shareholders -- were endemic to corporations in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century U.S. Yet investors nonetheless continued to buy stock in the ever increasing numbers of corporations that business people formed during this period. We attempt to understand this puzzling situation by examining the evolution of the legal rules governing both corporations and the main organizational alternative, partnerships. Because partnerships existed only at the will of their members, disputes among partners had the potential to lead to an untimely (and costly) dissolution of the enterprise. We find that the courts quite consciously differentiated the corporate form from the partnership so as to prevent disputes from having similarly disruptive effects on corporations. The cost of this differentiation, however, was to give controlling shareholders the power to extract more than their fair share of their enterprise's profits. The courts put limits on this behavior by defining the boundary at which private benefits of control became fraud, but the case law suggests that these constraints became weaker over our period. We model the basic differences between corporations and partnerships and show that, if one takes the magnitude of private benefits of control as given by the legal system, the choice of whether or not to form a firm, and whether to organize it as a partnership or a corporation, was a function of the expected profitability of the enterprise and the probability that a partnership would suffer untimely dissolution. We argue that the large number of corporations formed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were made possible by an abundance of high-profit opportunities. But the large number of partnerships that also continued to be organized suggests that the costs of corporate form were significant.

French investment banking at Belle Époque: the legacy of the 19th century Haute Banque

The research program about the history of investment banking assesses through this text the legacy transmitted by the merchant banks (Haute Banque) to the Paris banking market. It first delimited the foibles which hindered them in the last quarter of the 19th century, but précised how they succeeded in renewing themselves and in absorbing fresh forces of initiative and creativeness. It draws the strong lines of the strategic deployment of the private bankers, of their portfolio of banking skills and their aptitude to insert themselves in banking in the wake of “modern” banks or even to create one, the Banque de l’union parisienne (Bup) in 1904.Bank, merchant banking; Paris banking market; banking strategy; portfolio of strategic activities; firms’ portfolio of skills