We document a very large increase in agricultural productivity, peasants’ living standards, and industrial development in the 19th century Imperial Russia as a result of the abolition of serfdom. We construct a novel province-level panel dataset of development outcomes and conduct a...

We test the premise of the theoretical literature that M-form political hierarchies are effective in creating yardstick competition between regional divisions only when those divisions have sufficiently diversified or similar industrial composition. The reason for this is that the competition...

We test the premise of the theoretical literature that M-form political hierarchies are effective in creating yardstick competition between regional divisions only when divisions have sufficiently diversified or similar industrial composition. The reason is that the competition among...

We investigate the connection between privatization in post-communist Russia and a mass privatization reform in Imperial Russia, the 1906 Stolypin land reform. Specifically, we relate historical measures of conflicts associated with the Stolypin reform to contemporary views on whether the...

In the early twentieth century, a large number of households resettled from the European to the Asian part of the Russian Empire. We propose that this dramatic migration was rooted in institutional changes initiated by the 1906 Stolypin land titling reform. One might expect better property...