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 divisions have sufficiently diversified or similar industrial composition. The reason is that the competition among...