Working Papers

Collusion, Connection and Capture: The Political Economy of Late Tsarist Industrialization (Available upon request)

Different social classes have different tools at their disposal, such as political influence and collusion, which in turn influence the market structure of an economy. While the effects of political influence have been studied, the prevalence and associated outcomes of collusion are unclear, since collusion is usually illegal and thus difficult to measure. My paper uses the context of Late Tsarist Russia to study the relationship between elites, foreign entities, merchants and collusion, and how collusion may affect industrialization. Using a novel dataset I collected on collusive agreements and organizations, I study the associations between different founders and collusion, and between collusion and various outcomes using OLS and staggered event-studies. I find that elites and foreigners are negatively associated with new collusive activity. Given they hold political power, they likely do not need to collude. A collusive event is associated with higher market shares, lower profits and higher assets for all firms. Within the metallurgical sector, firms participating in collusion have lower assets and eventually see higher profits. At the industry level, after the start of collusion there is an increase in: revenues, the number of factories and mines, and machine power. The results imply that collusion may have allowed firms to invest in increasing production capacity, and was thus beneficial for industrialization.

Presented at: LSE Graduate Economic History Seminar, WEast Dublin Workshop 2024, LSE Seminar in Political Economy and Economic History, AMSE PhD Seminar, ENS Lyon Economic History Workshop, EHS 2025 (Strathclyde), EHA Philadelphia, Santa Clara University, Northwestern Economic History Workshop, CalTech Economic History Seminar, PSE Economic History Seminar, Yale Economic History Lunch

Firm Formation in Tsarist Russian Empire: The Effect of the Polish Revolt (Available upon request)

My study takes advantage of a natural experiment related to the reallocation of land due to the serf emancipation in the Tsarist Russian Empire. In 1863 the Polish nobility revolted against the Tsar in the Western part of the empire. The revolt failed, and in retaliation the Tsarist government revised the terms of the emancipation by taking more land from the Polish nobility and reallocating the land towards the peasantry in the affected regions. Through spatial analysis and using detailed data on corporate charters and manufacturing censuses, I document a divergence in firm formation, firm characteristics and founder characteristics between the regions where there was greater reallocation from the gentry to the peasantry.

Presented at: AMSE PhD Seminar, WEAI 2023, EHES 2023 (WU Vienna), Middlebury, EHS 2024 (Northumbria), Baltic Connections 2024 (Jyväskylä), LAGV 2024 (Aix-Marseille), and ICDE 2024 (Aix-Marseille)

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