Expropriation, money, and happiness: the impact of state theft in Russia.

The historically high prevalence of property extraction in transition nations provides a unique opportunity to explore the intersection of institutional economics and the economics of happiness. This study examines how instances of prior property confiscation affect the self-reported quality of life following political-economic transition in Russia during the early 1990s. Using retrospective data from the Social Stratification in Eastern Europe after 1989 project, we estimate both traditional ordered logit models and random-effects ordered logit models, the latter of which addresses clustering of respondents by region of the country. Our results indicate that prior property confiscation experiences lead to a gap between the probabilities of realizing the extreme values of life satisfaction of 21.1–26.5%-points, with prior property confiscation experiences decreasing (increasing) the probability of greater (lesser) life satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]