Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Industrialization and Commercial Law in Late Imperial Russia

到20世纪初，西欧几十年的持续经济增长，使俄罗斯帝国与邻国相比，成为一个贫穷的、以农业为主的社会。在1917年十月革命前的最后几十年，帝国政府颁布了几项旨在改善经济的改革。这些改革的一个核心目标是刺激俄罗斯规模虽小但扩张迅速的制造业的增长。这些改革的效果如何？这项建议寻求资金，收集和分析20世纪初以来俄罗斯制造业普查的公司一级数据以及19世纪后期的档案资料。这些数据将支持关于这一时期俄罗斯相对贫困的假设的检验。该项目使用经济和计量经济学工具来研究与俄罗斯经济后期发展相关的一系列问题。项目完成后，数据将通过ICPSR和类似组织向公众提供。这样一个新的工厂历史数据集将引起包括经济史、经济发展、产业组织、贸易和地理等各个领域的学者的兴趣。这项研究的结果将为鼓励制造业发展的各种商业法律制度提供线索。该项目通过确定特定制度（商法）如何影响经济结果来研究制度与经济增长之间关系的经济学文献。工业化和现代化是经济发展的两个主要目标，20世纪初的俄罗斯经济提供了在政治革命之前快速工业化和重大改革的最佳范例之一。通过了解俄罗斯帝国所采用的各种政策以及由此产生的工业化模式，研究人员可以了解今天发展中经济体所表现出的类似模式。此外，当工业化是一个发展目标时，这个项目将对哪些政策可以鼓励工业劳动力的增长产生影响。

By the beginning of the twentieth century, decades of sustained economic growth in Western Europe left the Russian Empire a poor and largely agricultural society compared with its neighbors. In the final decades before the October Revolution of 1917, the Imperial Government enacted several reforms designed to improve the economy. A central objective of these reforms was the stimulation of growth in Russia's small but rapidly expanding manufacturing sector. How effective were these reforms?This proposal seeks funding for the collection and analysis of firm-level data from Russian manufacturing censuses dating from the early twentieth century as well as archival sources from the late nineteenth century. This data will support tests of hypotheses concerning Russia's relative poverty in this period. The project uses economic and econometric tools to study a cluster of questions related to the late development of the Russian economy. When the project is completed, the data will be available to the public through the ICPSR and similar organizations. Such a new historical dataset of factories will be of interest to scholars in diverse fields including economic history, economic development, industrial organization, trade, and geography.The results of this research will provide clues about the kinds of commercial law regimes that encourage development of manufacturing. This project contributes to the literature in economics that examines the relationship between institutions and economic growth by determining how a specific institution, commercial law, affected economic outcomes. Industrialization and modernization are two major goals of economic development, and the Russian economy at the beginning of the twentieth century provides one of the best examples available of rapid industrialization and major reforms before political revolution. By understanding the kinds of policies employed by the Russian Empire and the resulting patterns of industrialization, researchers can gain an understanding of similar patterns exhibited by developing economies today. Furthermore, when industrialization is a goal of development, this project will have implications regarding which policies can encourage the growth of an industrial labor force.