We exploit a quasi-natural experiment of mobilized draftees in Russia during World War I to examine the effects of a massive, negative labor shock on agricultural production. Employing a novel district-level panel dataset, we find that mobilization produces a dramatic decrease in cultivated...

This edited volume represents the latest research on intersections of war, state formation, and political economy, i.e., how conflicts have affected short- and long-run development of economies and the formation (or destruction) of states and their political economies. The contributors come from...

This paper describes the main trends of the Russian economy through the Great War (1914 to 1917), Civil War (1918 to 1921), and postwar famine (1921 to 1922) for the general reader. During its Great War mobilization the Russian economy declined, but no more than other continental economies under...