| 1. |
|
|
| 2. |
|
|
| 3. |
- Collin, Kristoffer, 1983, et al.
(author)
-
Exploring regional wage dispersion in Swedish manufacturing, 1860–2009
- 2019
-
In: Scandinavian Economic History Review. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0358-5522 .- 1750-2837. ; 67:3, s. 249-268
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Economic theory predicts that regional wages will converge as transport and communication technologies bring labour markets together. An exploration of this transition from labour market segmentation to unification requires long-term evidence of nominal wages and cost of living by region. This paper presents new evidence of wages for male manufacturing workers and cost-of-living indices across 24 Swedish counties between 1860 and 2009. Our findings indicate that the Swedish regional wage differentials were a great deal larger in the 1860s than in the 2000s. Most of the compression took place between the 1860s and World War I, as well as in the 1930s and during World War II. Differences in expenditures on housing impact on our assessment of convergence in the post-World War II decades: the nominal measure declines, while the real one stays constant. Our concluding discussion engages with the assumption that before World War I, regional wage convergence was associated with labour mobility, spurred by improved communication and transportation technologies as well as by the implementation of modern employment contracts. In the 1930s and 1940s, in contrast, regional wage convergence can be traced to high unionisation and centralised collective bargaining in the labour market, two distinguishing features of the Swedish Model.
|
|
| 4. |
|
|
| 5. |
- Collin, Kristoffer, 1983
(author)
-
Regional wages and labour market integration in Sweden, 1732-2009
- 2016
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation consists of an introduction, four research papers and two papers that describe the data collected. Three county-specific data sets were constructed: one wage data set for the manufacturing sector, one wage data set for the agricultural sector, and one cost-of-living data set. The four research papers examine regional wage dispersion and labour market integration. Paper 1 explores regional wage dispersion in the Swedish manufacturing sector between 1860 and 2009. It shows a long-term tendency of convergence, interrupted by a brief spell of divergence in the period 1913–1931, and by stability after the early 1980s. Regional changes in the share of workers employed in industry played a minor role in this development. Instead, regional wage compression resulted from the catch-up between low-wage and high-wage regions.Paper 2 investigates the regional wage convergence of farm workers in Sweden between 1732 and 1980. Mainstream economic theory predicts that labour market outcomes will converge as transports and communication technologies increase labour mobility. This paper shows that regional wage dispersion declined from about 40 per cent to 4 per cent. Convergence characterised the era up to the Napoleonic wars; the period that followed was marked by quite stable wage dispersion. Industrialisation set in motion a new wave of convergence, also temporarily interrupted by the turmoil during the First World War and the deflation in the early 1920s. Paper 3 examines regional wage gaps between agricultural and manufacturing workers from 1860 to 1945. Previous research has mostly looked into aggregated wage differences between urban and rural workers. This paper shows large variations in wage gaps across regions and time. Geographical patterns prevailed during the widening of the wage gaps between the First World War and the early 1930s, as a result of different labour market responses to economic crises and wars. Regional wages between agricultural and manufacturing workers show a weak positive association until the Second World War, when it became negative, thus indicating regional disintegration. Paper 4 focuses on regional specialisation and the wage structure during the early industrialisation years, from 1860 to 1879. This paper employs regional industry-specific wages and employment data, yielding results that differ from those presented by other researchers. The results presented here show a more compressed inter-industry wage structure. A decomposition of the wage structure shows a shift from within-region to between-region factors, suggesting that regional specialisation played an important role in the wage structure. This dissertation provides new evidence of the long-term movement of regional wages in Sweden. The regional wages and cost-of-living series presented here capture wide time spans and make an important empirical contribution for future research into wages and prices.
|
|
| 6. |
|
|
| 7. |
- Hamark, Jesper, 1973, et al.
(author)
-
Industrial wages in mid-1880s Sweden: estimations beyond Bagge’s Wages in Sweden. Data, source and methods
- 2019
-
Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- 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 the movements of wages, it is not suitable for comparisons across industries or counties at a specific point in time. Nor should Wages in Sweden be used to estimate wages in absolute levels. Based on hitherto-unused source material from a large, nationwide public inquiry, we estimate industrial wages in the mid-1880s. The population consists of industrial workers with different experience, skills and firm attachment. Our estimations include a national wage as well as inter-industry and inter-regional wages in both absolute and relative terms, weighted by employment. The findings call for a substantial revision of relative wages across industries. They also indicate that the wage dispersion across industries and counties was lower than previously thought. We estimate the national wage for women as being half the size of that of men.
|
|
| 8. |
- Prado, Svante, 1974, et al.
(author)
-
Labour and the ‘law of one price’ : regional wage convergence of farm workers in Sweden, 1757–1980
- 2021
-
In: Scandinavian Economic History Review. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1750-2837 .- 0358-5522. ; 69:1, s. 41-62
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Economic theory predicts that differences in wages for workers with similar skills will decline as labour mobility increase. This prediction is reminiscent of the ‘law of one price’, the notion that markets, if unfettered, eliminates price differentials of similar commodities across space. But can we really apply the economic logic of the commodity market to the labour market, governed as it is by institutions and politics as well as market forces? In this paper, we have examined the spread in farm workers’ wages across Swedish counties in 1757–1980. Besides nominal wages, the paper also offers cost of living indices by county. The paper enquires into sigma convergence and beta convergence. Long-run convergence, by both measures, was massive; the coefficient of variation, for instance, declined from about 28 per cent in the mid-eighteenth century to 4 per cent in 1980. Most of the compression, though, occurred in brief episodes rather than continuously. Markets, through labour mobility and trade, and institutions, through collective actions and labour laws, took turns in pushing towards regional convergence. The ‘law of one price’, we conclude, was not singlehandedly responsible for the elimination of regional wage differentials.
|
|
| 9. |
|
|
| 10. |
- Öberg, Stefan, 1978, et al.
(author)
-
Regional Variation and Convergence of Height and Living Conditions in Sweden During the Twentieth Century
- 2017
-
In: Essays in Economic & Business History. - 0896-226X. ; 35:1
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This study investigates regional differences in height in Sweden during the twentieth century using data from universal conscript inspections (for men). We find substantive differences (2-3 cm) in height between the counties. Men in the southern, southeastern and northernmost parts of Sweden were shorter. Men in the Stockholm and Göteborg regions were taller and we find no “urban penalty” in height. The differences in height between counties declined over the course of the twentieth century and the average height increased more in the counties with an initially shorter average height. We find the expected positive associations between height and the real wage in manufacturing and the regional GDP per capita respectively. The real wage in the manufacturing sector is more consistently associated with the county average height than that for the agricultural sector. Contrary to expectations, we find that the men were consistently taller in counties with higher food prices and where the relative price of animal foods was higher. The average height was negatively associated with the infant mortality rate during the men’s childhood in the mid-twentieth century. The association was less clear in the early twentieth century.
|
|
