In the eighteenth century, European embassies in the Ottoman Empire started selling exemption licenses calledberats, which granted non-Muslim Ottomans tax exemptions and the option to use European law. I construct a novel price panel for British and French licenses based on primary sources. The evidence reveals that prices were significantly high and varied across countries. Agents acquired multipleberatsto enhance their legal options, which they exploited through strategic court switching. By the early 1800s,beratholders had driven other groups from European-Ottoman trade.

Turkey imposed a controversial tax on wealth to finance the army in 1942. This tax was arbitrarily assessed and fell disproportionately on non-Muslim minorities. We study the heterogeneous impact of this tax on firms by assembling a new dataset of all enterprises in Istanbul between 1926 and 1950. We find that the tax led to the liquidation of non-Muslim-owned firms, which were older and more productive, reduced the formation of new businesses with non-Muslim owners, and replaced them with frailer Muslim-owned startups. The tax helped “nationalize” the Turkish economy, but had negative implications for productivity and growth.

Recent research disputes the view that the joint-stock corporation played a crucial role in historical economic development, but retains the idea that the costless firm dissolution implicit in non-corporate forms deterred investment. A multi-armed bandit model demonstrates the benefits of costless dissolution in an environment where potential business partners are not fully informed. Experimentation creates a spike in dissolution rates early in firms’ lives, as less productive matches break down and agents look for better matches. Many of the better matches adopt the corporate form, whose higher dissolution cost functions as a commitment device. We test the model’s predictions using firm-level data on 12,000 enterprises established in Egypt between 1910 and 1949. The partnership reflected a trade-off between committing to a partner and sorting into potentially better matches, fostering the formation of more productive enterprises (JEL D21, D22, L26, N15, O16).

This study examines the transplantation and evolution of business law in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic, drawing broader implications for the economic and political determinants of legal transplantation for late industrializers. We show that the underlying political economy context was influential in shaping the way commercial law was transplanted and evolved in Turkey. Extraterritorial rights in the nineteenth century eroded the incentives to demand legal change by providing alternative legal rules to the non-Muslim commercial elite; the nation-building efforts of the twentieth century cultivated a new Muslim business class that was reliant on the state's goodwill for success and could not effectively push for more open access to novel forms of business organization.

No abstract