Papers by Andrei Markevich
International Review of Social History, 2006
Social Science Research Network, 2014
We study the long-run consequences of the Gulag on political preferences in modern Russia. We fin... more We study the long-run consequences of the Gulag on political preferences in modern Russia. We find that the location of a Gulag camp in a district is positively associated with anti-communist voting during the last Soviet 1991 referendum and the first post-Soviet 1996 presidential election. We interpret these results causally, arguing that Gulag camps provided evidence on Soviet political repression, which, in turn, affected the elections' results. We provide additional evidence on the validity of the "information" channel.
Social Science Research Network, 2011
We test the premise of the theoretical literature that M-form political hierarchies are effective... more We test the premise of the theoretical literature that M-form political hierarchies are effective in creating yardstick competition between regional divisions only when those divisions have sufficiently diversified or similar industrial composition. The reason for this is that the competition among poorly diversified interrelated divisions creates incentives for regional leaders to pursue policies that inhibit industrial growth in neighboring regions in order to make their own region look better from the point of view of the center. We use a unique episode in Soviet history, when a traditional Soviet unitary-form (U-form) hierarchy was replaced by a multidivisional-form (M-form) organization, namely, Khrushchev's "Sovnarkhoz" reform. First, we demonstrate that during this reform regional leaders were subjected to relative performance evaluation, which created incentives to generate industrial growth. Second, we show that these career concerns resulted in higher growth in regions with sufficiently diversified and, therefore, self-contained economies, and lower growth in highly specialized regions.
Yale University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2017
Warwick Research Archive Portal (University of Warwick), 2007
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Nov 1, 2010
The version presented here is a working paper or pre-print that may be later published elsewhere.... more The version presented here is a working paper or pre-print that may be later published elsewhere. If a published version is known of, the above WRAP url will contain details on finding it.
World Scientific Book Chapters, 2008
Military procurement in the Soviet economy under Stalin provides a novel historical context for a... more Military procurement in the Soviet economy under Stalin provides a novel historical context for a standard problem of market organization, that of contracting for quality. The Soviet ministry of defense was engaged in the procurement of military goods from Soviet industry. An internal market was formed and contracts were made. In the market, the contractor had power over the buyer and typically used this power to default on quality. In the background loomed a dictator, imperfectly informed, but with the power to tear up any contract and impose unlimited penalties on the contractor. The buyer's counter-action took the form of deploying agents through industry with the authority to verify quality and reject substandard goods. The final compromise restored quality at the expense of quantity. Being illicit, it had to be hidden from the dictator. Our case provides an historical illustration of the limits of dictatorship.
Yale University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2017
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International Review of Social History, Mar 30, 2006
This is a rather odd collection of lectures (the first three chapters) and essays (chapters 4 and... more This is a rather odd collection of lectures (the first three chapters) and essays (chapters 4 and 5), dealing, in the first sixty-six pages, with ''the escape from hunger and premature death'', and then moving to issues concerning the future of the health-care system which result from the success of this escape. Fogel's speculations about the future in the second half of the book-(How long can we live? Can we continue to finance health care and retirement in the future?)-are interesting, and at times comforting, but beyond the expertise of the reviewer. What links these essays to the general theme of the book is that Fogel investigates some of the long-term consequences of the historical processes he analyses in the first half of the book. In the first three chapters Fogel presents his interpretation of what he has coined the ''technophysio evolution''. In the preface he briefly refers to this as the process by which a fifty-fold increase in income occurred in the United States, Japan, and western Europe, as a result of which ''the peoples of these countries have greatly improved their health and more than doubled their longevity''. This is elaborated in chapter 1, ''The Persistence of Misery in Europe and America before 1900'', which argues, as the title suggests, that major changes in life expectancy (and human welfare in general) occurred only after 1900. This argument is mainly based on data on food consumption, and repeated in chapter 2, which has the equally indicative title: ''Why the Twentieth Century Was So Remarkable''. The latter contains, among others, a chart of world population, summarizing Fogel's view, showing an almost horizontal line before c.1850, and an almost vertical line afterwards. His point is: there was one major break in world history, and it occurred recently. A lot of what is discussed in these chapters has already been published by Fogel elsewhere (the lectures on which the first half of the book is based were given in 1996). The most interesting contribution of the present volume is the application of the idea of ''Waaler surfaces'' to this kind of historical research. These are three-dimensional relationships between height, weight, and risk of poor health or mortality. As we are all aware, there is an optimal relationship between height and weight (at a BMI of about 26). Nowadays, most of us are on the wrong side of it, in the sense that body weight is too high in relationship to height. In historical societies-before 1800-people were much smaller, consumed much less, and may have had a BMI that was much lower than optimal. The hypothesis that is formulated on the basis of these insights is that a large part of the decline in mortality during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was linked to improvements in food consumption leading to an increase in the BMI-index towards the ''optimal'' BMI. This is all very interesting, but the fundamental problem of Fogel's contribution to the debate about these issues is that it is not based on a sufficiently critical use of the underlying data. There is quite a lot of data on the height of individuals in the (recent) past, but information on weight is very scarce, and linked information on health risks even
All mistakes are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessar... more All mistakes are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jun 24, 2021
Social Science Research Network, 2011
Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern yo... more Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Dec 1, 2013
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Feb 1, 2015
Journal of Development Economics, 2013
We test the premise of the theoretical literature that M-form political hierarchies are effective... more We test the premise of the theoretical literature that M-form political hierarchies are effective in creating yardstick competition between regional divisions only when those divisions have sufficiently diversified or similar industrial composition. The reason for this is that the competition among poorly diversified interrelated divisions creates incentives for regional leaders to pursue policies that inhibit industrial growth in neighboring regions in order to make their own region look better from the point of view of the center. We use a unique episode in Soviet history, when a traditional Soviet unitary-form (U-form) hierarchy was replaced by a multidivisional-form (M-form) organization, namely, Khrushchev's "Sovnarkhoz" reform. First, we demonstrate that during this reform regional leaders were subjected to relative performance evaluation, which created incentives to generate industrial growth. Second, we show that these career concerns resulted in higher growth in regions with sufficiently diversified and, therefore, self-contained economies, and lower growth in highly specialized regions.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Dec 1, 2007
In hierarchies, agents' hidden actions increase principals' transactions costs and give rise to a... more In hierarchies, agents' hidden actions increase principals' transactions costs and give rise to a demand for monitoring and enforcement. The fact that the latter are costly raises questions about their scope, organisation, and type. How much control is enough? The paper uses historical records to examine Stalin's answers to this question. We find that Stalin's behaviour was consistent with his aiming to maximise the efficiency of the Soviet system of control subject to the loyalty of his inspectors and the risk of a "chaos of orders" arising from parallel centres of power.
The American Economic Review, Apr 1, 2018
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The Electronic Repository for Russian Historical Statistics brings together data extracted from v... more The Electronic Repository for Russian Historical Statistics brings together data extracted from various published and unpublished sources in one place. Its principal focus is Russian economic and social history of the last three centuries (18th-21st). The repository caters to the needs of the scholarly community, of teachers and students in the social sciences and humanities in higher education, and aims to provide the basis for an informed public debate on Russia's past and present social and economic performance. Data are available online for all interested users, free of charge. The repository provides regional level data for the territory of the current Russian Federation over the last two centuries (1800-2000), standardised to facilitate access and to enable comparative research over time and across space. Data are gathered on a standard programme, along seven principal lines of inquiry (population, labour, industrial output, agricultural output, services, capital, land) and for five cross-sections of Russian history (1795, 1858, 1897, 1959, 2002).
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Papers by Andrei Markevich