He received his PhD from Yale University and has held visiting and teaching positions at CalTech and Harvard University. An economic historian, his work touches on a variety of applied microeconomic topics in the industrial and institutional development of late Imperial Russia, with a particular interest in the economic consequences of serf emancipation and in the financing and governance of the early corporate sector. His recent research has been published in the American Political Science Review, The Journal of Economic History, the European Review of Economic History, and various other outlets.