Labor Surplus and Mass Mobilization: Russian Agriculture during the Great War

Paul Castañeda Dower and Andrei Markevich

No w0196, Working Papers from Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR)

Abstract: We use mass mobilization for World War I as an exogenous source of variation in the labor force to test the extent of agricultural surplus in one of the most quintessential examples of labor surplus, late imperial Russia. We construct district-level panel data describing agricultural production in the Russian Empire before and during the World War I. We show that districts that experienced greater mass mobilization responded by decreasing area under crops. We next demonstrate the differential effects of mobilization for commune and private farm production, peak and slack season production and cereals and animal husbandry production. Taken together, these results suggest that peasants responded to mass mobilization in a dramatic way. We estimate the upper bound of labor surplus in the agricultural sector to be significantly lower than previous estimates; however, our estimate is conditional on this peculiar pattern of labor removal.

Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2013-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-his and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cefir.ru/papers/WP196.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Labor Surplus and Mass Mobilization: Russian Agriculture during the Great War (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cfr:cefirw:w0196

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Julia Babich ().