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Do businesspeople who win elected office use their positions to help their firms? Business leaders become politicians around the world, yet we know little about whether their commitment to public service trumps their own private interests. Using an original dataset of 2,703 firms in Russia, I employ a regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of firm directors winning seats in subnational legislatures from 2004 to 2013. First, having a connection to a winning politician increases a firm's revenue by 60% and profitability by 15% over a term in office. I then test between different mechanisms, finding that connected firms improve their performance by gaining access to bureaucrats and not by signaling legitimacy to financiers. The value of winning a seat increases in more politically competitive regions but falls markedly when more businesspeople win office in a convocation. Politically connected firms extract fewer benefits when faced with greater competition from other rent-seekers.

Extensive literature shows that businesspeople thrive on political connections. Most research, however, does not differentiate between types of political connection, thus effectively assuming that economic return on being connected should not differ systematically between federal and regional, legislative and executive, formal and informal connections. We collect a unique comprehensive dataset on Russia's richest businesspeople in 2003–2010 and demonstrate that only certain types of connections work, depending on the political context. Our analysis shows that as Russian politics became centralized and the federal executive more powerful during the 2000s, businesspeople with informal connections to the federal executive increased their fortunes much faster compared with everyone else—including those with any other type of connections. Businesspeople's wealth thus dynamically reflected these important political changes. This suggests a procedure for inferring nominally unobservable changes in the political system from politically connected businesspeople's fortunes, while also shedding additional light on the institutional origins of informality in Russian politics today.

This article studies poverty among self-employed businesspeople in a rich country, Belgium. Existing research on self-employment income, compared with income of employees, has made clear that self-employed have a higher probability of falling in the lowest income groups and that there is a distinct self-employment effect. Our findings for Belgium show that approximately one quarter of those who are self-employed in their main occupation are living below the poverty line. We also confirm findings reported in the literature that income distribution among self-employed people is very unequal. It appears from our qualitative findings that poverty among self-employed businesspeople is something distinct from other forms of poverty. Several factors can cause self-employed businesspeople to end up in poverty. As a result, poverty is a multifaceted problem. Policy recommendations are formulated to prevent and combat poverty among self-employed businesspeople.

While the rule of law has been an important topic of research for entrepreneurship in transition economies, the relationship entrepreneurs have with the body of law remains understudied. This article explores everyday legality among politically affiliated and non-affiliated businesspeople in Russia; that is, the role of laws, written rules, standards, and requirements in their everyday business activities. Drawing on interviews and participant observations in Russian communities, I trace how an individual's political position impacts the ability of small entrepreneurs to navigate paperwork and bureaucracy. Utilizing a sociological approach to explore the behaviour of the law among businesspeople, my research demonstrates that although bureaucracy and written rules affect all entrepreneurs, multiple facets of the law constrain or promote an individual's access to opportunities in different ways. I found that political affiliation strengthens the power to succeed in the bureaucratic game, and to protect one's interests through court appeals. In contrast, non-affiliated entrepreneurs are limited in their capacity to deal with Russian bureaucracy, and to litigate the state using legal procedures. The main conclusion of the research is that political affiliation is the most significant line of differentiation and inequality among small and medium-sized enterprises because it affects their legal knowledge, their strategies for coping with paperwork, and their opportunities to mobilise the law. In addition, the study of small entrepreneurs also shows that in contemporary Russia everyone depends greatly on the power of the bureaucratic machine, rather than on the power of the law.

Examining accounting transactions between depositors in the first accounts ledger of the Bank of New South Wales contributes to our knowledge of early Australian colonial businesspeople and their business activities. A social network analysis framework is applied to the transactions to disclose business networks and prominent individuals in the networks. The analysis seeks to ascertain the importance of these people to commerce and the significance of their networks in facilitating commercial relationships in a business environment fraught with uncertainty. The results illustrate the importance of networks to colonial trade and mercantile activity, especially for smaller scale businesspeople.