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Economic History
Development Economics
Applied Microeconomics

Economic History
Development Economics
Microeconomics

May 2002 (Oral): Economic History, Development Economics
May 2001 (Written): Microeconomic and Macroeconomic Theory

"Communal Institutions, Resource Allocation, and Economic Growth in Russia, 1861–1905"

Professor Timothy Guinnane
Professor Carolyn Moehling
Professor Benjamin Polak
Professor Christopher Udry

June 2006

M.Phil. (2003), Department of Economics, Yale University
M.A. (2002), Department of Economics, Yale University
B.A. (2000), Economics (with departmental honors) and History, Northwestern University (Magna Cum Laude)

Dissertation Write-Up Fellowship, Economic History Association, 2005
Advanced Research Fellowship, U.S. Department of State, Program for Research and Training on
  Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union (Title VIII), 2004
Pre-Dissertation Award, Economic History Association, 2004
Ryoichi Sasakawa Foundation Fellowship, 2003–2004
Title VIII Scholarship, American Councils Russian Language and Area Studies Program, 2003
Yale Center for International and Area Studies Pre-Dissertation Grant, 2003
Graduate Summer Fellowships, Yale University, 2001–2003
University, Teaching, and Dissertation Fellowships, Yale University, 2000–2006
Phi Beta Kappa, Northwestern University, 2000
Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Scholar, Northwestern University, 1996–2000

Teaching Assistant, European Economic History, Fall 2004
Teaching Assistant, Economics of Natural Resources, Spring 2003
Teaching Assistant, American Economic History, Fall 2002 and Spring 2006

Research Assistant, Professor Carolyn Moehling, Yale University (Economics), 2001–2002
Research Assistant, Professor Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University (Economics), 1999–2000
Humanities Intern, Newberry Research Library, Chicago, Illinois, 1998

"The Chains of Freedom? Economic Effects of Serf Emancipation in Russia"

Professor Timothy Guinnane
Department of Economics
Yale University
PO Box 208269
New Haven, CT 06520-8269
Tel: (203) 432-3616
Fax: (203) 432-3898
Email: timothy.guinnane@yale.edu

Professor Benjamin Polak
Department of Economics
Yale University
PO Box 208268
New Haven, CT 06520-8268
Tel: (203) 432-9926
Fax: (203) 432-5779
Email: benjamin.polak@yale.edu

Bad institutions are thought to inhibit growth. This idea is not new. Alexander Gerschenkron (1965) famously argued that Russia’s relative backwardness in the 19th-century was caused by the peasant land commune. Due to its collective property rights system, joint financial obligations, and limitations on household decision-making, the land commune slowed agricultural productivity growth and limited the transfer of resources into industry. In this dissertation, I examine the impact of the commune on the Russian rural economy from the formalization of the institution in the 1860s to attempts at reform in the 1900s. I find Gerschenkron’s argument to be overstated and overly simplistic — the commune was a much more flexible institution than he and others have asserted.

This dissertation draws on previously untapped archival and published data sources to test Gerschenkron’s interpretation of the commune’s role in the rural economy. The centerpiece of this empirical work is a sample of responses to a household survey conducted in rural Moscow province in 1899. Collected from holdings in the Central Historical Archive of Moscow, this dataset includes economic and demographic information from over 640 households in 19 villages. I complement this rich source with village-level information from the same survey and from a similar one carried out in 1876–1877. Additional archival and contemporary published sources provide further insight into the rural economy and institutional regime of the period.

The first chapter, Land Communes and Factor Market Imperfections: Micro-Evidence from Late 19th-Century Russia (Job Market Paper), focuses on the implications of the communal system for factor mobility. Gerschenkron and others have argued that the commune’s system of collective property rights and control over household resource decisions introduced frictions into factor markets. These features of the commune reduced the ability of households to exit agriculture, thus lowering the supply of labor to industry. I employ the newly collected, household-level data to evaluate this argument. I show that households used a variety of factor adjustment mechanisms. These included the hiring of labor and the allocation of household labor to off-farm work. Households actively participated in land rental markets and were able to shift land between generations and within the community through the commune’s land allocation system. By looking at mortality shocks to households, I measure the extent of factor adjustments and the degree to which households were able to respond through different factor mechanisms. I show that household adjustments to mortality shocks came primarily through the labor market. I also find that the communal land allocation system was relatively efficient for adjusting land holdings. Even when the commune lagged in reallocating shares of its land, households could substitute by adjusting through labor and land rental markets. These findings suggest that distortions created by the commune in one market did not prevent households from making needed factor allocations through other means. This implies that communal limitations on labor mobility were less significant than Gerschenkron asserted.

In the second chapter, Land Redistributions and the Russian Peasant Commune in the 19th Century, I study a prominent feature of the communal system — occasional redistributions of a community's land among member households. Recent research in developing countries emphasizes the importance of well-defined, private property rights for providing incentives to maintain land quality, for reducing transaction costs in the land market, and for providing collateral to obtain credit. Redistributions potentially undermined all of these functions. This practice is the primary reason cited by Gerschenkron and others for the persistently low productivity of Russian agriculture over this period. I draw on a township-level dataset from Moscow province that includes the frequency of redistributions and indicators of economic and demographic conditions between 1858 and 1876. I first study the determinants of the decision to re-allot land. The findings suggest that communal redistributions approximated a system of market transactions by adjusting communal land shares in response to changes in household characteristics. Land was shifted to those households with higher marginal products. I then turn the analysis around and use a production-function framework to study the effects of land redistributions. I apply an instrumental variables methodology to solve the potential simultaneity problem between productivity and land re-allotments. The results show that areas where the practice was more frequent did not have significantly lower grain yields. This suggests that land redistributions themselves did not limit agricultural productivity.

The third chapter, The Chains of Freedom? Economic Effects of Serf Emancipation in Russia (work in progress), focuses on the changes wrought by the reforms of the 1860s. These measures ended serfdom and installed the commune as the collective recipient of land transferred to the peasantry. I draw on archival and published sources to study the economic consequences of the land deals received by peasant communities. Existing scholarship concludes that these settlements endowed peasants with too little land at too high of a price. I investigate whether communities that initially received more costly deals responded by engaging in non-agricultural occupations or adjusting land holdings. I match data from a sample of settlements in Moscow province to information on these villages in 1876 and 1899. I find evidence that the settlements had lingering effects on the availability of land, but by the end of the century, non-agricultural opportunities allowed communities to adjust to the initial conditions of the land deals.

I conclude that the constraints of the land commune, as interpreted by Gerschenkron and others, were not the fundamental causes of Russian underdevelopment in the late 19th century. Dysfunctional state institutions, geography, backward agricultural technologies, and exceptionally high population growth rates were factors that likely lowered the level of Russian economic development. Indeed, the latter two were perhaps indirectly connected to the commune’s presence. However, Russian peasants followed strategies that sidestepped, exploited, and adapted to inefficient features of the communal system as it was set up at the end of serfdom. The ability of rural households to adjust around frictions imposed by the commune is consistent with Paul R. Gregory’s (1982 and 1997) findings of relatively strong industrial and economic growth from the 1880s to the Revolution of 1917.