While economists have little question about the potential for liquidity constraints to influence the migration decision, the relative importance of these constraints has resisted empirical verification. The unique nature of the Stolypin agrarian reform in Russia provides a natural experiment...

In the early twentieth century, a large number of households resettled from the European to the Asian part of the Russian Empire. We propose that this dramatic migration was rooted in institutional changes initiated by the 1906 Stolypin land titling reform. One might expect better property...