Title: Shareholder Democracy under Autocracy: Voting Rights and Corporate Performance in Imperial Russia, co-authored with Amy Dayton (Strider Technologies) and Steven Nafziger (Williams College)

Abstract: This paper investigates how the rules that corporations wrote for themselves related to their financing and performance in an environment characterized by poor investor protections, Imperial Russia. We present new data on detailed governance provisions from Imperial Russian corporate charters, which we connect to a comprehensive panel database of corporate balance sheets from 1899 to 1914. We document how variation in votes per share and other shareholder rights provisions were related to corporate choices of using debt vs. equity and whether these governance provisions correlated systematically with performance measures on the balance sheet and in terms of the market-to-book ratio. This investigation reveals the tradeoffs weighed by Imperial Russian corporations and demonstrates the surprising flexibility that Russian corporations enjoyed, conditional on obtaining a corporate charter.

Title: Social Networks with Misclassified Links (joint w Arthur Lewbel and Xi Qu).

Abstract. We propose an adjusted 2SLS estimator for social network models when the links reported in samples are subject to two-sided misclassification errors (due, e.g., to recall errors by survey respondents, or lapses in data input). In a feasible structural form, misclassified links make all covariates endogenous and add a new source of correlation between the structural errors and endogenous peer outcomes (in addition to simultaneity), thus invalidating conventional estimators used in the literature. We resolve these issues by adjusting endogenous peer outcomes with estimates of the misclassification rates and constructing new instruments that exploit properties of the noisy network measures. We apply our method to study peer effects in household decisions to participate in a microfinance program in Indian villages. We find that ignoring the issue of link specification and applying conventional instruments would result in an upward bias in peer effect estimates.