A UK-based economist and historian adapts the Fernandez-Rodrik model to demonstrate how rural opposition to land reform in present-day Russia is a consequence of individually rational decisions by members of former state and collective farms regarding whether to support further land reform or...

We document substantial increases in agricultural productivity, industrial output and peasants’ nutrition in Imperial Russia as a result of the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Before the emancipation, provinces, where serfs constituted the majority of agricultural laborers, lagged behind...

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 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 analyzes the relative impacts of geographical and institutional factors on the economic development of the late Russian empire. I reconstruct gross regional products and labor productivity for all provinces of the empire around 1900 for the first time. My estimates highlight...

Enterprise creation, destruction, and evolution support the transition to modern economic growth, yet these processes are poorly understood in industrializing contexts. We investigate Imperial Russia’s industrial development at the firm-level by examining entry, exit, and persistence of...

Enterprise creation, destruction, and evolution support the transition to modern economic growth, yet these processes are poorly understood in industrializing contexts. We investigate Imperial Russia's industrial development at the firm-level by examining entry, exit, and persistence of...