Property Rights and Internal Migration: The Case of the Stolypin Agrarian Reform in the Russian Empire

Abstract

While economists have little question about the potential for liquidity constraints to influence the migration decision, the relative importance of these constraints has resisted empirical verification. The unique nature of the Stolypin agrarian reform in Russia provides a natural experiment with exogenous variation in liquidity constraints. The reform gives peasants the right to withdraw from the commune and to sell one's share of land. Previously liquidity constrained households could then take this opportunity to migrate to less populated areas. Some communes were not affected by the reform, permitting difference-indifferences analysis. Using a panel of historical data from 1901-1914 on regional migration, we find a strong positive correlation between the reform and migration. We employ instrumental variables to address the possible endogeneity due to omitted factors that might drive both commune exit and migration.

New Russian Economic History

“…They find a substantial increase in industrial output as a result of emancipation. Chernina et al (2014) consider the effect of the Stolypin reform on labor mobility. In particular, they study rural migration from the relatively densely populated European part of the empire to the land-abundant Asian part.…”

Economic Development of the Late Russian Empire in a Regional Perspective

“…He speculates that the commune was a flexible institution that was able to ease at least some formal constraints implied by imperial laws and doubts that there was agrarian crises in the outskirts of the empire full of virgin land and dense population. Indeed, recent research (Chernina et al 2013;Dower and Markevich 2013a,b;Nafziger 2008Nafziger , 2010 demonstrates that the commune was a complicated institution. It limited peasant initiative and decisions but at the same time provided more choice than scholars previously believed.…”

Was Stalin Necessary for Russia's Economic Development?

“…This is consistent with the view of Gerhenkron (1962) that the unusually slow decline of agriculture's share of GDP in Tsarist Russia can be explained by the barriers to the rural-urban migration, in particular, by the institutions of obschina. Obschina effectively prescribed communal ownership of land and existed in 38 out of 50 European provinces of Russia (Chernina et al, 2011). In other provinces either there were no communes or were the hereditary communes (with individual ownership of land).…”

“…Chernina et al (2011) show that over1906-1915, 22% of eligible households privatized their land (14% of eligible communal land).…”