Research
Working Papers
Job Market Paper. Human Capital and Industrialization: The Case of German Colonists in Late Imperial Russia.
Abstract: Between 1890 and 1913, Russian Empire experienced a rapid industrial transition, catching up with Western countries. The paper explores human capital's role in Russia's growth utilizing a unique historical experiment - the arrival of German colonists in 1763-1861, before Russia's industrial spurt. Upon arrival in Russia, the colonists developed primary schools that played an essential role in settlers' human capital formation in the 19th-20th centuries. I show that the schooling improvements caused by the colonists facilitated growth when Russia took an advanced phase of industrialization in the 1890s. The German presence increased modern occupations' share and generated productivity gains in the industrial sector. I show that the effect is visible only in the modern industries, experiencing an inflow of new technologies and managerial practices with higher human capital requirements. Additionally, I demonstrate the positive spillover effect - the increase in literacy rates of the native population. One factor contributing to the spillover effect is the increase in public funding at the local level. Moreover, I show that Germans positively affected the spread of Russian Protestantism that could increase the educational demand of the native population further.
Landed Elite and Expansion of Primary Schooling in the Russian Empire.
Abstract: The paper investigates the role of large noble landowners in schooling development throughout 1880-1911. The cross-section estimates indicate the negative effect of land concentration on education in the period right before Russia’s industrial spurt. The effect can be partially explained by the lower provision of schooling infrastructure - the channel previously established in the literature. I show that underinvestment in human capital slowed down industrialization and decreased labor productivity in the 1890s. Furthermore, I use a state-sponsored subsidy program launched in 1905-1907 as a schooling supply shock showing that areas with a historical prevalence of large landownership exhibited a higher increase in educational demand after 1900. This change occurred during the active industrial transformation, followed by political liberalization and the substantive decline of large landowners’ economic power. Overall, my findings indicate that the concentration of vast land resources in the hands of a narrow, privileged group hampered the human capital accumulation of the rural population and impeded industrial transformation. It can explain Russia’s failure to catch up with Western countries, pointed out by Alexander Gerschenkron.
The long-run impacts of the first pre-school institutions for poor children in early 20th century New York (joint with Philipp Ager).
Abstract: The project aims to understand the long-run impact of nursery attendance for children from predominantly poor families (families of foreign-born, single parent/working mothers). In addition, the project explores the complementarity between a nursery intervention that typically happened at an early age (e.g., infants) and kindergarten exposure that followed later (5-6 years old). For this project, we obtained a unique dataset with the locations of NYC nurseries (with coordinates) between 1883 and 1924. We calculated distances from the centroids of enumeration districts of Brooklyn and Manhattan to the nearest nursery/kindergarten for each cohort born between 1890 and 1910. Accordingly, we define a binary treatment variable using distance cutoff (below 0.35 km). We combine this data with US Census data that connects individuals and family characteristics of exposed individuals in 1900 and 1910 to their long-run economic outcomes in 1940. To assess the impact of pre-school education on long-term educational and labor market outcomes we implement a standard event-study design. We find an economically meaningful and positive impact of pre-school education on years of completed schooling and wages. In addition, we show that exposure to pre-schools mainly benefited minority groups - first and second-generation migrants as well as the black American population. We test the robustness of our findings by implementing recently developed estimators that mitigate concerns related to conventional event-study design and broadly confirm our baseline results.
Abstract: The project explores the discrimination practices against the female population of the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th century. In particular, we investigate whether the meager harvest that caused economic deprivation and starvation of thousands of rural inhabitants triggered gender discrimination towards newborns and young girls. We also evaluate whether the discrimination practices took place mainly in the districts where historically socioeconomic status of women was relatively low (communities with a higher proportion of Muslim population). Using data from Russian Censuses of 1897 and applying the difference in difference estimation approach, we find that exposure to famine interacted with the proportion of the district’s Muslim population leads to higher sex ratios (ratio of male to female population) in age cohorts. The link is robust to the inclusion of the district and age cohort fixed effects. We also find a negative impact of famine exposure on sex ratios corresponding with the female survival advantage widely explored in the literature. Further research will test the environmental, economic, and cultural explanations of the observed pattern in the data.
The Mortality Transition and the Urban Mortality Penalty: Evidence from Massachusetts Annual Vital Statistics 1880-1930 (joint with Philipp Ager and Casper Worm Hansen).
Abstract: This paper provides new evidence on the historical mortality transition and the urban mortality penalty by combining newly digitized vital statistics and population-census data from Massachusetts for half a century (1880-1930). Covering the universe of municipalities in the state, we nd that the urban mortality penalty was declining until the 1900s after which it remained constant and so by 1930 it was still 5 percent more deadly to live in the urban part of the state. We show that none of this development can be attributed to the most important deathly disease (tuberculosis), which had a constant penalty over the full period when accounting for the roll-out of the state sanatoria. We also demonstrate that initial wealthier municipalities experienced larger mortality declines in the beginning, while population density and immigration slowed down only the second phase of the mortality transition from 1900 to 1930.
Research in progress
The long-term effects of public kindergarten education: Evidence from the U.S. Kindergarten Movement (joint with Philipp Ager, Francesco Cinnirella, Katherine Eriksson, and Ezra Karger).
Coercion after Serfdom? Market Power, Factor Mobility, and Structural Change in Imperial Russia, 1861- 1914 (joint with Steven Nafziger and Dmitrii Kofanov)
Migration and economic development: the case of White Emigre in the US (joint with Philipp Ager)
Pre-Ph.D. Works