Olga Valisyeva used the political variation across sub-national regions of the Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin to understand how differences in the extent of elite fragmentation in autocracies affects the influence of resource abundance on the economic growth in the short run. She found that polities with fragmented elites underperform those with consolidated elites and link this effect to higher intensity of rent-seeking and higher costs of fights over rents due to the shorter time horizon of the elites.