This paper deals with agricultural dynamics in late-Imperial Russia. Based upon a comprehensive micro-level data set on annual yields between 1883 and 1913, we provide insight into regional differences of agricultural growth and the development prospects of Russian agriculture before WWI. Making...

We propose that the "historically relevant" comparison of the Danish and Russian Empires from the early eighteenth century until the First World War presents a useful starting point for a promising research agenda. We motivate the comparison, noting that the two empires enjoyed striking...

Decades of investment decisions by central planners left communist societies with structures of production ill-prepared for competitive markets. Their vulnerability to liberalization, however, varied across space. Similar to the effects identified in the "China shock" literature, we hypothesize...

We study the effect of changes in land tenure, launched by the 1906 Stolypin reform, on agricultural productivity in late Imperial Russia. The reform allowed peasants to obtain land titles and consolidate separated land strips into single allotments. Our estimations suggest that the net effect...

This paper shows that railroad building in Russia, as in Europe and the US in the nineteenth century, improved the value of land, a classic benefit of transportation investment in largely agrarian countries. From a database constructed for this paper, we use cross-sectional data for the fifty...

We propose that the "historically relevant" comparison of the Danish and Russian Empires from the early eighteenth century until the First World War presents a useful starting point for a promising research agenda. We justify the comparison by noting that the two empires enjoyed striking...

This paper studies the influence of the service sector (joint-stock commercial banks and railways) on the economic development of agricultural regions within the Russian empire in the second half of the 19th century, using the case of the Central Black Earth region. The study compares yield data...

Can state-owned banks spur development? Gerschenkron (1962) identified the State Bank of the Rus- sian Empire as the main institutional driver of the country's catch-up industrialization. In this paper, we test this assertion by evaluating the outcome of a policy experiment (1892-1903) under the...

This paper explores the local political economy of early agronomic efforts in Tsarist Russia by undertaking a two-part analysis of the role of the zemstvo – a 19th century institution of local self-government – in improving local agricultural conditions. First, we investigate the...

This paper examines knowledge spillovers across ethnic boundaries using the case of German immigration to the Russian Empire. We digitize the data on Saratov province in the early 20th century, and find that distance to German colonies predicts the prevalence of heavy iron ploughs, fanning mills...