Dmitrii Kofanov (MAE’2013) became the winner of the Ronald H. Coase Dissertation Award 2021 of The Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics.
The award committee members Federica Carugati (King’s College London), Florian Englmaier (University of Munich), Michael Powell (Northwestern University), and Brian Silverman (University of Toronto) selected three finalists from a pool of seven competitive candidates who wrote excellent dissertations, combining important questions with remarkable methodological and design skills to make significant contributions to their respective fields.
The first prize of the award went to Dmitrii Kofanov for his dissertation titled “Land Inequality, Industrialization and Unrest: Evidence from the Late Russian Empire.” Dmitrii got his Master’s degree in Economics at NES and a PhD in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2020. He is now a postdoctoral researcher with the Institutions and Political Economy Research Group at the University of Barcelona.
Dmitrii’s dissertation explores the tension between economic development and political instability. The focus is on the distributional consequences of development for the landed peasantry in the late Russian Empire at the onset of industrialization. Whereas a great deal of literature in political economy has linked unrest with inequality, and inequality with development, Dmitrii’s dissertation provides a unitary framework for analyzing these factors, illuminating the role of economic losers of development. Combining in-depth case studies with formal modeling and quantitative analyses on two novel datasets, Dmitrii finds that the intensity of conflict depended on the levels of labor absorption and competition for local natural resources. In other words, as he puts it, “depending on the nature of industrial development, its utilization of labor and material resources, we can observe different patterns of its influence on peasant discontent, which can be both positive and negative.”
Dmitrii’s work contributes to shed light on a question at the heart of the political economy of development. The committee was impressed by the sophistication of the work, its logical and narrative unity, and the skillful use of historical data to cast a new light on a pressing contemporary problem.