Nurlan Utesov

Ph.D. candidate in Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
On the 2026–27 academic job market.

I am an applied economist. My fields are political economy, economic history, development and public economics, with a second line of work in industrial organization.

My research examines how asymmetric information shapes the taxation of farms and the adoption of new technology: in agriculture the farmer knows more about the harvest and its quality than the state that taxes the farm or the buyer who pays for the crop. I study these problems mostly under autocracy, where the central government collects its taxes and allocates technology through local officials who know more than it does and whose interests differ from its own, a principal–agent problem inside the state.

Job market paper

Power Without Information: The Human Cost of Uniform Land Taxation in Subsistence Agriculture

Under autocracy the officials who collect the state's taxes answer only upward, for a target, and the people they act on have little room to refuse. What that costs is the paper's question, answered on the extreme case: the Soviet state's taxation of collective farms in the 1930s, where the state could punish without limit and still could not see the harvest. On the annual accounts of 272 collective farms, digitized from the state's own survey, the paper shows that the tax cost one member in twenty-eight, in excess deaths and expulsions, and that most of this cost, 63 per cent, came not from the information constraint, what the state could not see, but from the incentive constraint, the discretion of its own officials.

Read the paper (PDF) · Appendix · Abstract · All papers

Contact

Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics
University of Wisconsin–Madison
519 Taylor Hall, 427 Lorch Street, Madison, WI 53706
utesov@wisc.edu · department page

Advisors and references: Paul Castañeda Dower, Paul Mitchell, Guanming Shi.