Elin Bengtsson
Biographic Data
| ID | 454724 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elin Bengtsson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elin |
| FAMILY NAME | Bengtsson |
| SIGNATURE | BENGTSSON E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lund University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1523-0565 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 45 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Wealth, work, and industriousness, 1670–1860: Evidence from rural Swedish probates
This article uses a new database of 1,891 probate inventories from rural southern Sweden to investigate the development of rural households’ productive capacity from the late 1600s to the 1860s. Both labourers and farmers improved their material living standards – as measured by the contents of probate inventories – but the labouring households’ ownership of means of production decreased over time. This indicates increasing market involvement and…
The Politics of Profits: Profit Squeeze and Political-Economic Change in Sweden, 1975–85
In the mid- to late 1970s, the Swedish economy faced a profit squeeze which threatened to hamper investments and the creation of jobs. This engendered a massive debate in the media and among economists and policymakers. This article investigates what I call ‘the politics of profits, the debates around the role of corporate profits in a democratic capitalist society and economy and the policy measures directed towards manipulating the distribution…
The Social Origins of Democracy and Authoritarianism Reconsidered: Prussia and Sweden in Comparison
In a large social science literature, unequal rural class structures (“landlordism”) are associated with authoritarian political outcomes. This paper revisits the debate, focus- ing on the landlords’ ideological domination of the lower classes and anti-democratic attitudes in estate-dominated areas. We contrast the authoritarian landlordism model with a perspective where inequality fosters leftist mobilization if landlords fail to assert hegemony…
What Happened to the Incomes of the Rich during the Great Levelling? Evidence from Swedish Individual-Level Data, 1909-1950
We use individual-level income data from archived taxation lists to study top-income earners in Sweden from 1909 to 1950. Using information on 21,055 individual taxpayers in two elite areas in greater Stockholm, we show that top incomes fell in real terms over this period, at a stable pace without obvious connection to the Great Depression or the world wars. The peak of inequality was related to the early stages of a globalized economy with Schum…
The politics of inflation and revitalisation of wage solidarity in Scandinavia
This article compares the policy and collective bargaining responses in the three Scandinavian countries to the cost-of-living crisis that began in 2021. The countries are known for their coordinated and consensual response to exogenous shocks. However, Scandinavian variants of neoliberal reforms, the 2009 Financial Crisis and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic have challenged the model. The comparative analysis finds three things. First, Norw…
Long-run evolution of income inequality in the Nordic countries
This paper surveys Nordic historic studies on the distribution of income to highlight similarities and differences between Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in the evolution of income concentration and income inequality over more than 140 years. Our descriptive analysis allows for a decomposition where we identify the contribution of the income share of the richest 1 per cent and the distribution of income among the other 99 per cent to overal…
Income inequality in Mexico, 1895-1940: Industrialisation, revolution, institutions
This paper, building on new archival research and the social table method, presents comprehensive estimates of income inequality in Mexico in 1895, 1910, 1930 and 1940. Inequality grew from 1895 to 1910, driven by economic expansion within the context of an oligarchic economy. While real income increased for the lower classes during this period, the main beneficiaries were large landowners and entrepreneurs. In the revolutionary period from 1910 …
Incomes and income inequality in Stockholm, 1870–1970: Evidence from micro data
This paper analyzes incomes and income inequality in Stockholm from 1870 to 1970. The paper builds on a new dataset of 38,022 randomly sampled Stockholm residents 1870–1950, with information on income, occupation, age, gender, and household composition. This is complemented by the Census of 1930 and a Statistics Sweden sample for 1960 and 1970. Incomes were very unequally distributed between 1870 and 1920, with Gini coefficients of pre-tax income…
Income inequality in an industrial city during the great levelling: Micro level evidence from malmö, 1900–1950
This paper contributes to the debate on historical income inequality, and especially on the decrease in inequality found in industrialised countries during the first half of the twentieth century. We use new archival individual – and household-level data for taxpayers in Sweden's third-largest city, Malmö, from 1900 to 1950. Previous research has established that Sweden had a distinctive downturn in income inequality during the first half of the …
The Origins of the Swedish Wage Bargaining Model
This paper revisits the development of the canonical Swedish wage bargaining model, from the 1930s to the 1950s. The question at the core of the debate is: how did Sweden achieve “good” wage bargaining institutions -- good, in the sense of facilitating investment, employment, and controlled inflation? The conventional account focuses on the actions of employers and trade unions in export industry, and a cross-class alliance between the two. This …
Bondesamfunn og bondeopposisjon på Agder: I overgangen mellom seinmiddelalder og tidlig nytid ca. 1480–1615
"Bondesamfunn og bondeopposisjon på Agder: I overgangen mellom seinmiddelalder og tidlig nytid ca. 1480–1615." Scandinavian Economic History Review, 71(1), pp. 100–101
The Evolution of Popular Politics in 19th-Century Sweden and the Road from Oligarchy to Democracy
In the 20th century, Sweden distinguished itself as one of the most organized and participatory democracies in the world. But in the late 19th century the situation was much the opposite – Sweden had for Western Europe a low degree of suffrage, and low political participation. To explain the turnaround, this paper explores the evolution of a democratic political culture in the final third of the 19th century, in opposition to the oligarchic syste…
The social origins of democracy in Sweden: The role of agrarian politics
In discussions of Scandinavian democratisation, it is commonplace to argue that long-standing farmer representation in parliament and a lack of feudalism facilitated early democratisation. The present essay questions this interpretation in the Swedish case. It centres on a re-interpretation of farmer politics at the national level from the 1866 two-chamber parliament reform to the alliance between the farmers’ party and Social Democrats in 1933. …
Mercantilist inequality: Wealth and poverty in Stockholm, 1650-1750
This article describes and analyses social structure, poverty, wealth, and economic inequality in Stockholm from 1650 to 1750. We begin by establishing the social structure, using census data and other sources. To study wealth and poverty, the main sources are a complete record of the wealth tax of 1715, comprising 17,782 taxpayers, and a total of 1,125 probate inventories sampled from the years 1650, 1700, and 1750. These provide detailed and so…
Justice Alternatives by Pat Carlen and Leandro Ayres França (2019)
Wages, Income Distribution and Economic Growth: Long-Run Perspectives in Scandinavia, 1900–2010
This article views analysis of the influence of capital–labour income distribution on economic growth from a historical perspective, using data from 1900 onwards. We study the three Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, where conventional accounts of the postwar growth miracles in these small, open economies have emphasized the role of wage restraint, favouring profits and investment over consumption. Instead, we show that the 195…
The rise of the middle class: The income gap between salaried employees and workers in Sweden, ca. 1830–1940
We present the first comprehensive, long run salary information on Swedish middle-class employees before the twentieth century. Our data include, for instance, school teachers, professors, clerks, policemen and janitors in Stockholm and Sweden, ca. 1830–1940. We use the new data to compare the annual earnings of these middle-class employees with the annual earnings of farm workers, unskilled construction workers and manufacturing workers. The res…
Peasant Aristocrats? Wealth, Social Status and the Politics of Swedish Farmer Parliamentarians 1769–1895
Sweden was unique in early modern Europe, in that its parliament included a peasant farmer estate. It is commonplace in Swedish and international research to consider the peasant farmer politicians as guarantors of a liberal and egalitarian path of development. In the Swedish-language literature on political history, these people are often seen as rather narrow-minded, their common political programme limited to the issue of keeping (their own) t…
Unequal poverty and equal industrialisation: Finnish wealth, 1750–1900
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 un…
The wealth of the Swedish peasant farmer class (1750–1900): Composition and distribution
Using about 1,730 probate inventories, this article studies the wealth of peasant farmers in Sweden for the years 1750, 1800, 1850 and 1900. Average wealth grew rapidly, tripling over the nineteenth century, but it did not grow equally: the Gini coefficient for the farmers’ wealth grew from 0.46 in 1750 to 0.73 in 1900. Farmers who lived close to the major grain markets in Stockholm and the mining district of Bergslagen were wealthier than others…
The Swedish Sonderweg in Question: Democratization and Inequality in Comparative Perspective, c.1750-1920
During the twentieth century, Sweden became known as a country with an unusually egalitarian distribution of income and wealth, an encompassing welfare state, and an exceptionally strong social democracy. It is commonplace among historians and social scientists to consider these equal outcomes of the twentieth century as the logical end result of a much longer historical trajectory of egalitarianism, from early modern free peasant farmers or from…
Aristocratic Wealth and Inequality in a Changing Society: Sweden, 1750–1900
The role of the European nobility and their ability to retain their political and economic power are part of the debate on the modernization of Europe’s economy. This paper contributes to the literature by exploring the wealth of the Swedish nobility as the country evolved from an agrarian to an industrial economy. We use a sample of 200+ probate inventories of nobles for each of the benchmark years 1750, 1800, 1850 and 1900. We show that the nob…
Capital Shares and Income Inequality: Evidence from the Long Run
This article studies the long-run relationship between the capital share in national income and top personal income shares. Using a newly constructed historical cross-country database on capital shares and top income data, we find evidence on a strong, positive link that has grown stronger over the past century. The connection is stronger in Anglo-Saxon countries, in the very top of the distribution, when top capital incomes predominate, when usi…
Wealth inequality in Sweden, 1750-1900
This article examines the evolution of wealth inequality in Sweden from 1750 to 1900, contributing both to the debate on early modern and modern inequality and to the general debate on the pattern of inequality during industrialization. The pre-industrial period (1750-1850) is for the first time examined for Sweden at the national level. The study uses a random sample of probate inventories from urban and rural areas across the country, adjusted …
The economic effects of the 1920 eight-hour working day reform in Sweden
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, capit…
Wealth inequality in Sweden, 1750-1900
This article examines the evolution of wealth inequality in Sweden from 1750 to 1900, contributing both to the debate on early modern and modern inequality and to the general debate on the pattern of inequality during industrialization. The pre-industrial period (1750-1850) is for the first time examined for Sweden at the national level. The study uses a random sample of probate inventories from urban and rural areas across the country, adjusted …
The (International) Political Economy of Falling Wage Shares: Situating Working-Class Agency
This paper relates the financial and monetary dimensions of the contemporary economic crisis to working-class agency via a central concern of classical political economy: the distribution of surplus between the chief factors of production. The fall in the wage share of value added is now accepted as a stylised fact in the empirical economic literature. This paper argues that the punctuated pattern of the development validates the regulation theor…
Aristocratic Wealth and Inequality in a Changing Society: Sweden, 1750–1900
The role of the European nobility and their ability to retain their political and economic power are part of the debate on the modernization of Europe’s economy. This paper contributes to the literature by exploring the wealth of the Swedish nobility as the country evolved from an agrarian to an industrial economy. We use a sample of 200+ probate inventories of nobles for each of the benchmark years 1750, 1800, 1850 and 1900. We show that the nob…
Capital Shares and Income Inequality: Evidence from the Long Run
This article studies the long-run relationship between the capital share in national income and top personal income shares. Using a newly constructed historical cross-country database on capital shares and top income data, we find evidence on a strong, positive link that has grown stronger over the past century. The connection is stronger in Anglo-Saxon countries, in the very top of the distribution, when top capital incomes predominate, when usi…
Incomes and income inequality in Stockholm, 1870–1970: Evidence from micro data
This paper analyzes incomes and income inequality in Stockholm from 1870 to 1970. The paper builds on a new dataset of 38,022 randomly sampled Stockholm residents 1870–1950, with information on income, occupation, age, gender, and household composition. This is complemented by the Census of 1930 and a Statistics Sweden sample for 1960 and 1970. Incomes were very unequally distributed between 1870 and 1920, with Gini coefficients of pre-tax income…
Mercantilist inequality: Wealth and poverty in Stockholm, 1650-1750
This article describes and analyses social structure, poverty, wealth, and economic inequality in Stockholm from 1650 to 1750. We begin by establishing the social structure, using census data and other sources. To study wealth and poverty, the main sources are a complete record of the wealth tax of 1715, comprising 17,782 taxpayers, and a total of 1,125 probate inventories sampled from the years 1650, 1700, and 1750. These provide detailed and so…
The social origins of democracy in Sweden: The role of agrarian politics
In discussions of Scandinavian democratisation, it is commonplace to argue that long-standing farmer representation in parliament and a lack of feudalism facilitated early democratisation. The present essay questions this interpretation in the Swedish case. It centres on a re-interpretation of farmer politics at the national level from the 1866 two-chamber parliament reform to the alliance between the farmers’ party and Social Democrats in 1933. …
Wealth, work, and industriousness, 1670–1860: Evidence from rural Swedish probates
This article uses a new database of 1,891 probate inventories from rural southern Sweden to investigate the development of rural households’ productive capacity from the late 1600s to the 1860s. Both labourers and farmers improved their material living standards – as measured by the contents of probate inventories – but the labouring households’ ownership of means of production decreased over time. This indicates increasing market involvement and…
The Origins of the Swedish Wage Bargaining Model
This paper revisits the development of the canonical Swedish wage bargaining model, from the 1930s to the 1950s. The question at the core of the debate is: how did Sweden achieve “good” wage bargaining institutions -- good, in the sense of facilitating investment, employment, and controlled inflation? The conventional account focuses on the actions of employers and trade unions in export industry, and a cross-class alliance between the two. This …
The wealth of the Swedish peasant farmer class (1750–1900): Composition and distribution
Using about 1,730 probate inventories, this article studies the wealth of peasant farmers in Sweden for the years 1750, 1800, 1850 and 1900. Average wealth grew rapidly, tripling over the nineteenth century, but it did not grow equally: the Gini coefficient for the farmers’ wealth grew from 0.46 in 1750 to 0.73 in 1900. Farmers who lived close to the major grain markets in Stockholm and the mining district of Bergslagen were wealthier than others…
The Mechanics of Modernity in Europe and East Asia: The Institutional Origins of Social Change and Stagnation
Erik Ringmar , The Mechanics of Modernity in Europe and East Asia: The Institutional Origins of Social Change and Stagnation, London and New York, Routledge 2005 (reprint 2009), 266 pp., ISBN 978-0
Labour's share in twentieth-century Sweden: A reinterpretation
The distribution of national income between capital and labour is a classical theme in political economy. This paper takes a long-run perspective to the issue and asks two questions: How did the distribution of income between capital and labour develop in Sweden from 1900 to 2000? And how can this development best be explained? It is shown that labour's share in Sweden in the 100 years from 1900 to 2000 saw three important shifts, and the three s…
The (International) Political Economy of Falling Wage Shares: Situating Working-Class Agency
This paper relates the financial and monetary dimensions of the contemporary economic crisis to working-class agency via a central concern of classical political economy: the distribution of surplus between the chief factors of production. The fall in the wage share of value added is now accepted as a stylised fact in the empirical economic literature. This paper argues that the punctuated pattern of the development validates the regulation theor…
Education, state and citizenship
This nine-chapter (plus introduction) anthology comes out of the large research project The Nordic Welfare State – Historical Foundations and Future Challenges which started in 2007 and is based in
Capital Shares and Income Inequality: Evidence from the Long Run
The economic effects of the 1920 eight-hour working day reform in Sweden
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, capit…
Aristocratic Wealth and Inequality in a Changing Society: Sweden, 1750–1900
The role of the European nobility and their ability to retain their political and economic power are part of the debate on the modernization of Europe’s economy. This paper contributes to the literature by exploring the wealth of the Swedish nobility as the country evolved from an agrarian to an industrial economy. We use a sample of 200+ probate inventories of nobles for each of the benchmark years 1750, 1800, 1850 and 1900. We show that the nob…
Capital Shares and Income Inequality: Evidence from the Long Run
This article studies the long-run relationship between the capital share in national income and top personal income shares. Using a newly constructed historical cross-country database on capital shares and top income data, we find evidence on a strong, positive link that has grown stronger over the past century. The connection is stronger in Anglo-Saxon countries, in the very top of the distribution, when top capital incomes predominate, when usi…
Wealth inequality in Sweden, 1750-1900
This article examines the evolution of wealth inequality in Sweden from 1750 to 1900, contributing both to the debate on early modern and modern inequality and to the general debate on the pattern of inequality during industrialization. The pre-industrial period (1750-1850) is for the first time examined for Sweden at the national level. The study uses a random sample of probate inventories from urban and rural areas across the country, adjusted …
Unequal poverty and equal industrialisation: Finnish wealth, 1750–1900
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 un…
The wealth of the Swedish peasant farmer class (1750–1900): Composition and distribution
Using about 1,730 probate inventories, this article studies the wealth of peasant farmers in Sweden for the years 1750, 1800, 1850 and 1900. Average wealth grew rapidly, tripling over the nineteenth century, but it did not grow equally: the Gini coefficient for the farmers’ wealth grew from 0.46 in 1750 to 0.73 in 1900. Farmers who lived close to the major grain markets in Stockholm and the mining district of Bergslagen were wealthier than others…
The Swedish Sonderweg in Question: Democratization and Inequality in Comparative Perspective, c.1750-1920
During the twentieth century, Sweden became known as a country with an unusually egalitarian distribution of income and wealth, an encompassing welfare state, and an exceptionally strong social democracy. It is commonplace among historians and social scientists to consider these equal outcomes of the twentieth century as the logical end result of a much longer historical trajectory of egalitarianism, from early modern free peasant farmers or from…
The rise of the middle class: The income gap between salaried employees and workers in Sweden, ca. 1830–1940
We present the first comprehensive, long run salary information on Swedish middle-class employees before the twentieth century. Our data include, for instance, school teachers, professors, clerks, policemen and janitors in Stockholm and Sweden, ca. 1830–1940. We use the new data to compare the annual earnings of these middle-class employees with the annual earnings of farm workers, unskilled construction workers and manufacturing workers. The res…
Peasant Aristocrats? Wealth, Social Status and the Politics of Swedish Farmer Parliamentarians 1769–1895
Sweden was unique in early modern Europe, in that its parliament included a peasant farmer estate. It is commonplace in Swedish and international research to consider the peasant farmer politicians as guarantors of a liberal and egalitarian path of development. In the Swedish-language literature on political history, these people are often seen as rather narrow-minded, their common political programme limited to the issue of keeping (their own) t…
Wages, Income Distribution and Economic Growth: Long-Run Perspectives in Scandinavia, 1900–2010
This article views analysis of the influence of capital–labour income distribution on economic growth from a historical perspective, using data from 1900 onwards. We study the three Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, where conventional accounts of the postwar growth miracles in these small, open economies have emphasized the role of wage restraint, favouring profits and investment over consumption. Instead, we show that the 195…
Bondesamfunn og bondeopposisjon på Agder: I overgangen mellom seinmiddelalder og tidlig nytid ca. 1480–1615
"Bondesamfunn og bondeopposisjon på Agder: I overgangen mellom seinmiddelalder og tidlig nytid ca. 1480–1615." Scandinavian Economic History Review, 71(1), pp. 100–101
The Evolution of Popular Politics in 19th-Century Sweden and the Road from Oligarchy to Democracy
In the 20th century, Sweden distinguished itself as one of the most organized and participatory democracies in the world. But in the late 19th century the situation was much the opposite – Sweden had for Western Europe a low degree of suffrage, and low political participation. To explain the turnaround, this paper explores the evolution of a democratic political culture in the final third of the 19th century, in opposition to the oligarchic syste…
The social origins of democracy in Sweden: The role of agrarian politics
In discussions of Scandinavian democratisation, it is commonplace to argue that long-standing farmer representation in parliament and a lack of feudalism facilitated early democratisation. The present essay questions this interpretation in the Swedish case. It centres on a re-interpretation of farmer politics at the national level from the 1866 two-chamber parliament reform to the alliance between the farmers’ party and Social Democrats in 1933. …
Mercantilist inequality: Wealth and poverty in Stockholm, 1650-1750
This article describes and analyses social structure, poverty, wealth, and economic inequality in Stockholm from 1650 to 1750. We begin by establishing the social structure, using census data and other sources. To study wealth and poverty, the main sources are a complete record of the wealth tax of 1715, comprising 17,782 taxpayers, and a total of 1,125 probate inventories sampled from the years 1650, 1700, and 1750. These provide detailed and so…
Justice Alternatives by Pat Carlen and Leandro Ayres França (2019)
Income inequality in an industrial city during the great levelling: Micro level evidence from malmö, 1900–1950
This paper contributes to the debate on historical income inequality, and especially on the decrease in inequality found in industrialised countries during the first half of the twentieth century. We use new archival individual – and household-level data for taxpayers in Sweden's third-largest city, Malmö, from 1900 to 1950. Previous research has established that Sweden had a distinctive downturn in income inequality during the first half of the …
The Origins of the Swedish Wage Bargaining Model
This paper revisits the development of the canonical Swedish wage bargaining model, from the 1930s to the 1950s. The question at the core of the debate is: how did Sweden achieve “good” wage bargaining institutions -- good, in the sense of facilitating investment, employment, and controlled inflation? The conventional account focuses on the actions of employers and trade unions in export industry, and a cross-class alliance between the two. This …
The politics of inflation and revitalisation of wage solidarity in Scandinavia
This article compares the policy and collective bargaining responses in the three Scandinavian countries to the cost-of-living crisis that began in 2021. The countries are known for their coordinated and consensual response to exogenous shocks. However, Scandinavian variants of neoliberal reforms, the 2009 Financial Crisis and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic have challenged the model. The comparative analysis finds three things. First, Norw…
Long-run evolution of income inequality in the Nordic countries
This paper surveys Nordic historic studies on the distribution of income to highlight similarities and differences between Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in the evolution of income concentration and income inequality over more than 140 years. Our descriptive analysis allows for a decomposition where we identify the contribution of the income share of the richest 1 per cent and the distribution of income among the other 99 per cent to overal…
Income inequality in Mexico, 1895-1940: Industrialisation, revolution, institutions
This paper, building on new archival research and the social table method, presents comprehensive estimates of income inequality in Mexico in 1895, 1910, 1930 and 1940. Inequality grew from 1895 to 1910, driven by economic expansion within the context of an oligarchic economy. While real income increased for the lower classes during this period, the main beneficiaries were large landowners and entrepreneurs. In the revolutionary period from 1910 …
Economics (21 works) · Political science (17 works) · Inequality (13 works) · Politics (11 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Market economy (10 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (10 works) · Demographic economics (9 works) · Labour economics (9 works)