Microanalysis of Peasant Households in the Era of Modernization: Evidence from the Russian Empire

The article presents the results of the econometric analysis of microdata obtained from drawing up the budgets of peasant households in five regions – two European (Novgorod province, Simbirsk province) and three Asian (Ural region, Central Asian and Far Eastern) – in the period from the beginning of the Stolypin reform (1906) to the outbreak of the First World War (1914). The purpose of the study is to shed light on the question of whether there was an agrarian revolution in pre-revolutionary Russia. The regression analysis of the production function showed that the main factor significantly influencing the output is the amount of land, followed by the number of horses, with number of workers being insignificant. At the same time, it follows from the stochastic boundary model applied to the production function that there are no technologically special differences between the regions, whereas technologies did not differ much from previous centuries. Study of peasant farms' embeddedness in market relations demonstrated that marketability in all the regions was approximately 31-37%. It is concluded that during the period under study in Russia, the modernization of the agricultural sector was at an initial stage, that is, the processes that could later lead to an agrarian revolution were just beginning.