Do property rights matter in Russia? The Stolypin titling reform and agricultural productivity

We study the effect of improvements in peasants’ property rights launched by the Stolypin reform on agricultural productivity in early 20 century Russia. We find that the enclosure component of the reform caused an increase in land productivity. We argue that this effect is mainly driven by better usage rights and not because of economies of scale or better tenure security. In addition, we find that the titling component of the reform, which improved transfer rights, decreased the total productivity of land. We present evidence that this negative effect is driven by the transaction costs of exiting and the outflow of labor from the countryside. We also investigate a criticism of the reform -that it increased tensions and conflicts in the Russian village -to explore whether conflicts limited the positive effect of reform. 1 Very preliminary please do not cite without authors permission. Acknowledgements: Earlier versions of this paper were presented at 2011 ‘Property rights workshop’ (Moscow, Russia) and seminar at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. We would like to thank all the participants of these seminars for advice and comments. 2 Paul Castañeda Dower is from New Economic School (Moscow, Russia) and Centre of Economic and Financail Research ((Moscow, Russia); Andrei Markevich is from New Economic School (Moscow, Russia) and University of Warwick (Coventry, UK).