Balance sheets: this archive contains balances sheets for all years between 1894 and 1982^[1] for all companies contained in the Company archive. Moreover, it includes also balance sheets for all companies comprised in one of the volumes of the source. All those latter companies are founded and ceased in the period between two benchmark years and thus do not appear in the benchmark year volumes and in the Company archive. The following balance sheet items are considered: share capital, physical assets, inventory, securities and investments, cash and credits, bonds, various types of debts, sinking founds, provisions, profits (losses), total dividends, allocations, monetary equalization fund.

_{[1] For some periods, there is only a limited number of balance sheets. For the early years, this is due to the fact that the first volume, published in 1908, has a limited coverage of the companies. The scarce number of balance sheet for the period 1940-1945 is of course due to WWII. Finally, the gap between 1972 to 1980 is due to the limited coverage of the 1980 volume. In this case, we have decided to collect the information only for 1981 and 1982.}