Religious minorities and firm ownership in early twentieth‐century Egypt

Abstract

This article examines the composition of firm ownership and entrepreneurship in Egypt between 1910 and 1949 by assembling a novel dataset on multi‐owned firms. The evidence supports two main results. First, Muslim participation remained disproportionately low in partnerships but was distinctly high in corporations relative to non‐Muslims. Second, Muslim‐owned firms were frailer and more likely to experience early exits. The findings are consistent with the view that the region's institutional legacy, such as disparities in physical or human capital, created obstacles for Muslims. When these implications are tested, the findings show that only small‐scale Muslim firms had restricted access to capital. The skewness in Muslim firms’ entry and start‐up size is probably the result of legal distortions introduced by the government, which entrenched a small class of political elites in large‐scale firms.

The Impact of Business Cycle Conditions on Firm Dynamics and Composition

“…Artunç (2019) andArtunç and Guinnane (2019) also take advantage of this dataset to address questions relating to ownership structures and choice of enterprise form.…”

The Use of Quantile Methods in Economic History

“…compared to other regions around mid-nineteenth century;Dupont (2007), which tests for contagion in bank runs in Kansas during the panic of 1893;Canaday (2008), which deals with the relationship between wealth and wealth accumulation by both blacks and whites in SouthCarolina between 1910 and 1919, and its determinants;Drelichman and González-Agudo (2014), which reconstructs housing costs for various social groups and traces the effect of exogenous shocks on the rental market for Toledo, Spain, between 1489 and 1600; Álvarez and Ramos-Palencia (2018), which deals with the relationship between human capital and male labour earnings in eighteenth-century Spain; andCallaway and Collins (2018), which measures the union wage premium for several US-cities circa 1950, using unconditional quantile methods.The Economic History Review, in turn, has published five articles where quantile regressions were used:Temin and Voth (2008) analyses the cost and availability of private bank credit between 1702 and 1724;Gazeley and Newell (2011), in turn, estimates urban poverty among working families in the British Isles circa 1904; Brown and Guinnane (2018) deals with the causes of fluctuations in infant mortality rates in Bavaria during the 1820s-1910s;Artunç (2019) examines the composition of firm ownership and entrepreneurship in Egypt between 1910 and 1949; whileKaragedikli and Tunçer (2021) estimates real hedonic house prices and urban wealth inequality for the housing market between 1720 and 1814 in the Ottoman Empire. Note that as above, these articles show both a broad scope of themes, as well as a broad scope of geographic and temporal settings which have been productively analysed with these models.The European Review of Economic History has also published five articles making use of quantile regression:Koepke and Baten (2005), which provides the first anthropometric estimates of the biological standard of living in Europe during the first millennium AD;Dincecco (2009), which performs a statistical analysis of political regimes and sovereign credit risk in Europe from 1931 crisis.Cliometrica has published six articles using quantile regressions, the first of these less than a decade ago: Carson (2012), compared body mass index values of late 19th-and early 20th-century amongst African-Americans groups (i.e.…”