Land Tenure and Productivity in Agriculture: The Case of the Stolypin Reform in Late Imperial Russia

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Dower, Paul Castãneda Markevich, Andreĭ
Copyright Year	2019
Abstract	We study the effect of improvements in peasants’ land tenure, launched by the 1906 Stolypin reform, on agricultural productivity in late Imperial Russia. The reform allowed peasants to obtain land titles and consolidate separated land strips into single allotments. We find that consolidations increased land productivity. If the reform had been fully implemented, it would have doubled grain production in the empire. We argue that an important factor determining the positive impact on productivity is a decrease in coordination costs, enabling peasants to make independent production decisions from the village commune. In contrast, the titling component of the reform decreased land productivity and we present evidence that transaction costs explain this short-run decline.
Starting Page	241
Ending Page	267
Page Count	27
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
DOI	10.2139/ssrn.2361860
Volume Number	23
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://economics.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/markevich_march_4.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2361860
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article