Did Russia's emancipated serfs really pay too much for too little land? : statistical anomalies and long-tailed distributions -- On good numbers and bad : Malthus, population trends, and peasant standard of living in late Imperial Russia -- Serfs in Imperial Russia demographic insights -- Serf...

The wave of upbeat stories on the developing world's emerging middle class has reinvigorated a debate on how social class in general and the middle class in particular ought to be defined and empirically measured. With the aim of adding clarity to this debate, this dissertation provides a...