Alex Royt

I'm a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, where I study the economic and social history of the Soviet Union. While originally a scholar of international history and international political economy, my research steady moved to examining the function and history of banking firms in socialist economies. This has brought my work in conversation with prominent themes in business history, such as the evolution of the firm and the problem of management incentive. My dissertation seeks to examine the hitherto ignored conflict between central and free banking within the Soviet Union, focusing on the years of the New Economic Policy and the first two Five-Year Plans. By tracking the evolution of reforms and practices of financial intermediation, it situates the Soviet banking firm in the industrialization process undertaken during Stalinism for the first time.