Like all facets of daily life, the food that Russian farms produced and citizens ate – or, in some years, didn’t eat – underwent radical shifts in the century between the Bolshevik Revolution and Vladimir Putin’s presidency. The modernization of agriculture during this time is usually...

We present cross-country evidence that a country's macroeconomic volatility, measured either by the standard deviation of output growth or the occurrence of trend-growth breaks, is significantly affected by the country's historical variables. In particular, countries with longer histories of...