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War, housing rents, and free market: A case of Berlin's rental housing market during World War I
Kholodilin K.
Before the World War I, the urban rental housing market in Germany could be described as a free and competitive market. The government hardly interfered in the relationships between the landlords and tenants. The rents were set freely. During the World War I, the market was hit by several violent shocks. The outbreak of the war led initially to a huge outflow of men from cities to the fronts. Towards the end of the war, the cessation of construction as well as an inflow of workers and mustered out of service soldiers produced an acute housing shortage. Using a unique data set of asking rents extracted from the newspaper announcements, we constructed a monthly time series of rents in Berlin over 1909-1917. This variable is employed to measure the effects of demand and supply shocks on different segments of housing: from small dwellings for poor to large apartments for rich. The analysis shows a decline of rents (especially of the cheap dwellings) in the first half of the war, followed by a moderate increase. This stands in marked contrast to a steady and strong increase of the overall price level.
Dolgov A., Социальные и гуманитарные науки. Отечественная и зарубежная литература. Серия 11: Социология 2025 № 3 С. 13–53
The paper provides an overview of a special issue of the Journal of Classical Sociology (2024, N 4) devoted to the impact of World War I on the life trajectories and intellectual legacy of the classics of sociology. It shows how Georg Simmel, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Werner Sombart, Ferdinand Tönnies, W.E.B. Du Bois, George ...
Added: January 16, 2026
Бадиков Р. А., Вестник Московского городского педагогического университета. Серия: Исторические науки 2016 № 4 С. 14–25
In the article the author attempts to consider the content of Heinrich Khristoforovich Eiche’s duties, who was a leading Bolshevist commander of the Civil War period, at the initial stage of his military career during the First World War (1914–1918). Considerable attention is paid to problems of the evolution of the inner world of a ...
Added: October 11, 2025
Z. G. Son, Koreanology 2024 No. 2(7) P. 40–54
The article analyzes the conditions of labor migration of ethnic Koreans from Manchuria and China to the Urals of the Russian Empire in 1915–1916 and their experience of interaction with the local Russian authorities. The research is based on the archival materials of the State Archive of the Sverdlovsk region (GASO). This article focuses on ...
Added: October 6, 2024
Okhotnikova O., Khriakov A., Новое литературное обозрение 2023 Т. 184 № 6 С. 171–181
The article examines Russian and German postcards from the First World War. Postcards were the most popular and democratic means of wartime communication. The patriotic mobilization of the First World War stimulated the need for internal consolidation within the warring countries, which contributed to the formation of shared national identities. This article shows how the ...
Added: November 27, 2023
Ladynin I. A., Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета. Серия 2: История. История Русской Православной Церкви 2021 № 98 С. 74–92
The article discusses the correspondence between the Swiss Egyptologist Eduard Naville and the outstanding Russian Egyptologist Vladimir Golenishchev, the collector of antiquities that laid the cornerstone for the Egyptian department of A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. This correspondence is preserved at Vladimir Golenishchev Archives, Paris. In 1910s both Naville and Golenishchev were considered ...
Added: October 27, 2021
Алферова И. В., Блохин В. Ф., Богомолов А. И. et al., История. Общество. Политика 2020 Т. 15 № 3 С. 148–155
The article examines the specifics of the formation of collective memory in Russia on some examples of commemoration about of the First and Second World wars. The authors emphasize that the generalizing discourse of national memory is largely set by the state, and the state determines the content, the ways of commemoration, and the agenda ...
Added: January 4, 2021
Nenovsky N., Revue d'histoire de la pensée économique 2020 No. 10 P. 103–139
World War I marked the final point of the continuous process of fiduciarisation of money, of the detachment from its substance, the final point of establishing « Russian type of ideal money ». Paper currency was a Russian tradition, since 1769, until the introduction of the gold standard in 1897. The war brought back the ...
Added: December 24, 2020
Laptev A., Федерализм 2017 № 3 (87) С. 168–175
With the outbreak of the First World War, the Smolensk police and gendarmerie faced the activation of revolutionary and anti-war elements in society. Martial law was taken advantage of not only by revolutionary organizations, but also by enemy intelligence. Mass agitation and propaganda in the rear of the Russian army made it possible not only ...
Added: October 31, 2020
Laptev A., В кн.: Земля и Власть в истории России : сборник научных статей участников Всероссийской научной конференции памяти профессоров А. Г. Кузьмина, В. Г. Тюкавкина и Э. М. Щагина.: М.: МПГУ, 2020. С. 472–483.
The First World War gave the local government front and rear provinces new tasks of supplying the front and ensuring law and order and state security in the rear of the active army. The situation was complicated by the large migration of the population and the growing crisis in the economic, social and spiritual life ...
Added: October 31, 2020
Тарасов Константин, Ab Imperio 2020 № 2 С. 102–135
The article problematizes Eugene Weber’s normative model of nationbuilding through standard schooling and universal military conscription by looking at the case of the Russian imperial army during World War I. The absence of truly universal standardized schooling in late imperial Russia resulted in the emergence of semi-isolated circuits of solidarity when mass conscriptions and war experiences generated mass-scale political mobilization in ...
Added: October 1, 2020
Вайсбанд Э., Partial Answers 2019 Vol. 17 No. 2 P. 319–347
Providing the literary and philosophical comparative context of Petr Guber’s short story “Job Dulder (A Variation on the Old Theme)” (1923), the essay analyses a pre-Holocaust literary treatment of the Book of Job, enacting the collision of the traditional (Judaic) worldview of East European Jews with disastrous sides of modernity in Word War I and ...
Added: June 13, 2019
Kholodilin K., Максимова М. А., / NRU Higher School of Economics. Series WP BRP "Economics/EC". 2019. No. 212.
This study focuses on the ground transportation system and its impact on the rents in 30 of Russia's largest cities. It also compares the effect with subway transit networks. The data set includes rent information from an all-Russia online advertisement website Avito and various measures of proximity to the public transit network stops (including subways ...
Added: February 14, 2019
Konstantin Kholodilin, Waltl S., Leonid Limonov, / Series 750 "Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin". 2019.
This article studies the evolution of housing rents in St. Petersburg between 1880 and 1917, covering an eventful period of Russian and world history. We collect and digitize over 5,000 rental advertisements from a local newspaper, which we use together with geo-coded addresses and detailed structural characteristics to construct a quality-adjusted rent price index in ...
Added: February 1, 2019
Kholodilin K., European Review of Economic History 2016 Vol. 20 No. 3 P. 322–344
New archival evidence on housing rents in Berlin over 1909-1917 is presented. The data are extracted from newspaper announcements and georeferenced. Using hedonic regressions, quality-adjusted rent indices are constructed and employed to analyze the rental dynamics during World War I, when housing market experienced several shocks. The outbreak of the war led to an outflow ...
Added: January 31, 2019
Sunderland W., Cornell University Press, 2014.
In The Baron's Cloak, Willard Sunderland tells the epic story of the Russian Empire's final decades through the arc of the Baron's life, which spanned the vast reaches of Eurasia. Tracking Ungern's movements, he transits through the Empire's multinational borderlands, where the country bumped up against three other doomed empires, the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Qing, and where the violence unleashed by war, revolution, and imperial ...
Added: November 9, 2018
Kholodilin K., Gerasimov T., International Journal of Regional and Local History 2019 Vol. 14 No. 1 P. 1–20
World War I led to radical changes in the government policy of participating countries. The enormous demographic and economic disturbances caused by the war forced the governments of all the belligerent nations to drastically restrict the market freedom. In particular, the state began actively intervening in the housing market. Ukraine as a part of the ...
Added: October 29, 2018
Bessmertnaya O., Шаги/Steps 2018 Т. 4 № 1 С. 9–44
The paper analyses the discourse on pan-Islamism (the perceived Islamic menace both to the ‘global’ European civilization and the integrity of the Russian Empire) in Russian imperial structures (especially, the Ministry of the Interior) during 1910–1914. The discourse is considered as one of the institutionalized ways of constructing Russia’s ‘own’ Muslim other (along with the ...
Added: April 17, 2018
Naidenova I. N., Усынина О. И., Инновации 2017 № 7(225) С. 105–111
The paper is focused on the analysis of Russian stock market reaction on the announcements related to innovative activity of Russian traded companies. We use event study methodology to estimate abnormal stock returns in the announcement day. It is assumed that information about company’s progress in innovative activity is incorporated in stock prices. Therefore, if ...
Added: November 22, 2017
Kovalova A., Семенов В., Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 2017 № 4 С. 1–23
In the 1910s, cinema censorship traditions and rules varied in different Russian provinces, leading to widespread discussion of the whole topic. The article focuses on censorship practices in the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary capital, Petersburg / Petrograd. It investigates censorship documents of the 1910s, discusses the influence of World War I on Petrograd censorship, and draws ...
Added: August 19, 2017
Kovalova A., Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 2017 Vol. 11 No. 2 P. 96–117
Pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema has traditionally been divided into two periods: pre-1914 and after. The first period has been perceived as one of inception and learning, while the second as an era of maturity and genuine establishment of early Russian cinema. World War I, which abruptly restricted the import of foreign films into Russia, has usually ...
Added: May 26, 2017
Kholodilin K., Meerovich M., Journal of Urban History 2018 Vol. 44(5) P. 930–952
World War I played a key role in shaping modern housing policy. While in the pre-War era, there was virtually no housing policy, hostilities led to an almost immediate and comprehensive state intervention in the housing market, particularly among those engaged in the war. Originally, Russia went the same way as the other countries. However, ...
Added: April 17, 2017