Working Papers / Department of Economy and Society
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The Quest for Bureaucratic Efficiency - Sweden’s Rise and Fall as an Empire
(2024-04)The prevailing literature on global state capacity suggests that: 1) Europe was pulling ahead of other regions in the early modern period, and 2) state capacity in this period was mostly dedicated to the purposes of ... -
Skill Premium in Sweden, 1900–1950
(2024-04)This paper documents the evolution of wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers in Sweden throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Using newly digitized data on income taxes, this paper demonstrates ... -
Did industrialization improve the skill composition of the population? Evidence from Sweden, 1870 to 1930
(2024-03)This paper documents the changing skill composition during industrialization in Sweden using population censuses and HISCO/HISCLASS scheme. The results reveal a general shift from unskilled to more-skilled occupations, ... -
Slavery, Resistance and Repression: A Quantitative Empirical Investigation
(2024-03)In this article, we study what individual and social characteristics made it more likely for an individual to resist slavery. We employ a unique census from the Caribbean island of St. Croix in 1846, which allows us to ... -
Thriving in a declining economy - Elite persistence in the West Indies, 1760-1914
(2024-03)The issue of how elites as a social group come to be, how they maintain their position and how they affect the society they come to control is very much at the centre of the inequality debate. The present paper studies ... -
Numeracy and the legacy of slavery Age-heaping in the Danish West Indies before and after emancipation from slavery, 1780s-1880s
(2024-02)In many slave societies, enslaved persons were barred from acquiring much education. What skills the enslaved persons nonetheless were able to acquire, and how this changed following emancipation, is not well known. We ... -
The persistence of wealth Economic inequality in a Caribbean slave colony in the very long run
(2024-02)It has been proposed that slave societies were the most unequal societies in recorded human history. What little evidence there is shows an ambiguous picture. We contribute with a study on the wealth distribution in a ... -
Occupational structure in a black settler colony: Sierra Leone in 1831
(2024-01)Occupational structure is a valuable proxy for economic development when more direct indicators are lacking. This study employs occupational structure for the Colony of Sierra Leone in 1831 with the aim of contributing ... -
The failed promise of freedom: Emancipation and wealth inequality in the Caribbean
(2024-01)Was there any redistribution of resources in the Caribbean societies after emancipation from slavery? What were ex-slaves’ prospects to improve their socioeconomic status after emancipation? To shed some light on these ... -
Reconstructing a slave society: Building the DWI panel, 1760-1914
(2023-07)In this article, we discuss the sources employed and the methodological choices that entailed assembling a novel, individual-level, large panel dataset containing an incredible wealth of data for a full population in ... -
Urbaniseringen av det regionala musiklivet
(2023-01)This report seeks to explore the geographical spread of music in Sweden during the last pre-pandemic year 2019. Statistics from the 1980s are also presented. It was found that in many regions there has been a reluctance ... -
From Global to Local: Trade Shocks and Regional Growth in Italy During the First Globalization
(DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMY AND SOCIETY, 2022-11)Globalization can create winners and losers at the spatial level within national economies. 1bis paper examines the economic impact of international trade on local economies in the case of late nineteenth-century Italy. ... -
Unions, insurance and changing welfare states: The emergence of obligatory complementary income insurance in Sweden
(2022-01)Why do unions that support comprehensive public unemployment insurance introduce the private alternative known as obligatory complementary income insurance (OCII)? In this article, we seek answers to how Swedish unions ... -
Wage distribution within the Swedish State Railways, 1877–1951: Material and methods.
(2021-06)For nine decades, the Swedish State Railways (SJ) produced wage records containing all its permanent employees. SJ employed more people than any private employer in Sweden, and the records contain individual-level information ... -
Jordnaturernas fördelning i Sveriges län år 1700. En rekonstruktion, samt en jämförelse med förhållandena vid 1500-talets mitt
(2020-08)From the mid-16th to the early 20th century, Swedish farms were divided in three cadastral categories: tax, crown and exempt land. In 1700, each category made up for about a third of the farms, but precise information ... -
Labour market conflicts in Scandinavia, c. 1900–1938: The scientific need to separate strikes and lockouts
(2020-02)Research on labour markets conflicts has come a long way. Today we know that conflicts vary over business cycles and with the design of labour market institutions; they tend to cluster around wars and return in longer ... -
Too LATE for Natural Experiments: A Critique of Local Average Treatment Effects Using the Example of Angrist and Evans (1998)
(2019-11)There has been a fundamental flaw in the conceptual design of many natural experiments used in the economics literature, particularly among studies aiming to estimate a local average treatment effect (LATE). When we use ... -
Industrial wages in mid-1880s Sweden: estimations beyond Bagge’s Wages in Sweden. Data, source and methods
(2019-09)Most researchers interested in Swedish wages during early industrialization have used the seminal work Wages in Sweden from the 1930s as their point of departure. Whereas the material in Wages in Sweden solidly tracks ... -
Instrumental variables based on twin births are by definition not valid
(2018-04)Instrumental variables based on twin births are a well-known and widespread method to find exogenous variation in the number of children when studying the effect on siblings or parents. This paper argues that there are ... -
An introduction to using twin births as instrumental variables for sibship size
(2017-04)Some families who experience a twin birth get one more child than they had intended and planned for. This is the reason why twin births are used to create instrumental variables (IVs) for the number of children in a family. ...
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