| 1. |
- Ahnland, Lars, 1974-
(författare)
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Private debt in Sweden in 1900–2013 and the risk of financial crisis
- 2015
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Economic History Review. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0358-5522 .- 1750-2837. ; 63:3, s. 302-323
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study presents new time series data for private debt in Sweden in 1900–2013, including credit from banks, mortgage institutes and credit companies. The reconstruction of the data is a scientific task by itself, and is complicated by changed definitions, breaks in the series, and the need for occasional interpolation and cross-reference of sources. The obtained data reveal both qualitative and quantitative changes in the structure of private debt in Sweden during the period. One finding is a pattern where the era starting with the deregulation of the credit market in 1985 resembles the era preceding World War Two. Both periods experienced a high level of private debt-to-GDP ratio as well as severe financial crises. In a first application of the data, the hypothesis of rising private debt in the years before a financial crisis is explored through logit regression. The findings are in line with international research, and suggest that higher lending, especially from banks, might aggravate the risk of financial crisis.
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| 2. |
- Albinsson, Staffan, 1951
(författare)
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A Salary Bass: A study of bassists' earnings in the Royal Swedish Opera, 1799 – 1980
- 2016
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Economic History Review. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0358-5522 .- 1750-2837. ; 64:1, s. 19-35
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The number of occupations which have hardly altered at all, thus not suffering from Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’, is very restricted. However, one such profession is the contrabassist’s. Classical music is still largely produced in the same way as when it was first performed. There is very little productivity change in the actual production of music from bygone times. This, too, is a phenomenon rare in society at large and in the economy in particular. In this study I test Baumol’s Cost Disease with the Swedish Hovkapellet bass players as my focus. The disease occurs when salary increases in jobs that have seen no increase of labour are accepted. Have musicians such as bass players seen a stagnating salary development compared to professions in industries which have actually seen labour productivity growth? This, together with other related issues, is discussed based on longitudinal salary data for the Hovkapellet musicians and similar data from Copenhagen and Paris. All data are primary data collected from the orchestra archives. The data indeed verify the Baumol Cost Disease hypothesis. The open question discussed is whether that is an actual problem or not.
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| 3. |
- Andersson, Lars-Fredrik, et al.
(författare)
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Profits, dividends and industry restructuring : the Swedish paper and pulp industry between 1945 and 1977
- 2016
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Economic History Review. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0358-5522 .- 1750-2837. ; 64:3, s. 278-296
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper explores the role of profit distribution in the restructuring of the Swedish paper and pulp industry between 1945 and 1977. In addressing this issue, we will draw on the life-cycle theory and market imperfection arguments to examine whether the less profitable firms shared more of their profits as dividends, or remained on the market longer by reinvesting the majority of the profits. Our study shows that an increasing share of the profits was distributed to owners over time, and thus less profit was reinvested in industrial renewal. We find that the observed general upward trend in dividends can be attributed to the decline in profit and firm legacy, as firms in the Swedish pulp and paper industry kept dividends up while reducing reinvestment as their profit margins decreased over time. Our study shows that the market imperfections related to capital taxation and investment funds increased rather than decreased dividends.
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| 4. |
- Andersson, Lars Fredrik, 1974-, et al.
(författare)
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Sickness absence in compulsory and voluntary health insurance : the case of Sweden at the turn of the twentieth century
- 2017
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Economic History Review. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0358-5522 .- 1750-2837. ; 65:1, s. 6-27
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- At the turn of the twentieth century, Swedish health insurance was organised according to the Western European models of both voluntary, `fraternal´ principles and compulsory, `factory scheme´ principles. In this paper, we trace the characteristics of both organisational forms, and compare the sickness absence by considering the role of risk selection and mitigation across a large panel of voluntary and compulsory health insurance societies operating in Sweden between 1900 and 1910. We find that voluntary societies used a wide set of rules and practices in order to select and monitor members in order to keep down the number of sick cases. Compulsory societies applied shorter waiting periods and offered more medical treatment, leading to more frequent but shorter sickness absences.
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| 5. |
- Arnberg, Klara, 1979-
(författare)
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Beyond Mrs consumer : competing femininities in Swedish advertising trade publications, 1900–1939
- 2018
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Economic History Review. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0358-5522 .- 1750-2837. ; 66:2, s. 153-169
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article follows the discussion on female consumers in Swedish advertising journals and handbooks. The aim is to problematise the gendered aspects of Swedish consumer and early advertising history, by studying how the notion of the female consumer intersected with notions of social class, marital status and sexuality. The article also closes in on the persons who were invited to embody the consuming women and what kind of interests they represented. The article concludes that, from the start of the twentieth century, gender and class was prevalent in the advertising literature. The married woman was also from the start seen as the head of the consuming family. Therefore, reaching her through advertising became key for facilitating the relations between producer and consumer. With time, different women's organisations, the weekly press, and new theories of advertising from the US addressing the notion of 'Mrs Consumer' came to influence the Swedish advertising trade press. The result became the favouring of a certain kind of middle class, urban and rational kind of femininity, strongly connected to homemaking and women's roles in purchasing for the family. However, this femininity also paralleled notions of 'the flapper' and the professional woman.
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| 6. |
- Bengtsson, Erik, 1984
(författare)
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Education, state and citizenship
- 2015
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Economic History Review. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0358-5522 .- 1750-2837. ; 63:2, s. 203-205
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Recension (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 7. |
- Bengtsson, Erik, et al.
(författare)
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The economic effects of the 1920 eight-hour working day reform in Sweden
- 2017
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Economic History Review. - : Routledge. - 0358-5522 .- 1750-2837. ; 65:2, s. 149-168
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In 1920, the working day in Swedish manufacturing and services was cut from 10 to 8 hours without wages being cut correspondingly. Since workers demanded and got the same daily wage working 8 hours as they had with 10, real hourly wages increased dramatically; they were about 50% higher in 1921–1922 than they had been in 1919. This is the largest wage push in Swedish history, and this paper studies the consequences for profits, investments, capital intensity and unemployment. In traded manufacturing employers responded by increasing capital intensity and did not compensate for rising wages by raising prices, which led to a combination of jobless growth and low profit rates in the 1920s. Firms in non-traded manufacturing and services could raise prices and conserve profitability to a higher degree. In total, the effects of the reform were pro-labour. We discuss the implications for our understanding of interwar wages and employment, the literature on the decrease in inequality found in most industrial countries around 1920 and the rise of the ‘Swedish model’ in the 1920s and 1930s.
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| 8. |
- Bengtsson, Erik, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Unequal poverty and equal industrialisation: Finnish wealth, 1750-1900
- 2019
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Economic History Review. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0358-5522 .- 1750-2837. ; 67:3, s. 229-248
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We present the first comprehensive, long-run estimates of Finnish wealth and its distribution from 1750 to 1900. Using wealth data from 17,279 probate inventories, we show that Finland was very unequal between 1750 and 1850; the top decile owned about 90% of total wealth. This means that Finland was more unequal than the much wealthier economies Britain, France and the US, which goes against the common assumption of richer economies being more unequal. Moreover, when industrialisation took off in Finland, inequality started a downward trajectory. High inequality 1750-1850 was bottom-driven, by a large share of the population owning nothing or close to nothing of value, while economic development after 1850 was pro-equal since the ownership of forests, since long in the hands of the peasantry, became more valuable with the development of forest-based industries. Our findings thus contradict commonplace assumptions that economic growth and industrialisation are associated with more inequality, as well as recent arguments that very few factors beyond catastrophes can decrease inequality. We instead argue for a more inductive and open approach to the determinants of long-run inequality.
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| 9. |
- Bohman, Magnus, 1980-
(författare)
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Deal with it! : The emergence and reversal of an agro-ecological crisis, Southern Sweden in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- 2017
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Economic History Review. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0358-5522 .- 1750-2837. ; 65:2, s. 206-220
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The European Early Modern period provides examples of stagnating and even declining production and energy consumption per capita, which can be interpreted as indicators of an emerging crisis. With a focus on agriculture sector, some have suggested that the crisis was ‘conditional’ – meaning that a crisis can only be observed in some cases. This article investigates one such case, a village in Southern Sweden during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and investigates the mechanisms that mediate population growth to deteriorating living standards and environmental degradation. It provides new insights into the conditions of pre-industrial agriculture, particularly as regards the consequences of intensified demand pressure in ecologically fragile areas, and argues that human societies must be studied in tandem with their natural surroundings.
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| 10. |
- Collin, Kristoffer, 1983, et al.
(författare)
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Exploring regional wage dispersion in Swedish manufacturing, 1860–2009
- 2019
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Economic History Review. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0358-5522 .- 1750-2837. ; 67:3, s. 249-268
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)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.
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