Jakob Molinder — Economic Historian
I am an economic historian at Uppsala University and Lund University, and Director of the Uppsala History of Inequality and Labor Lab (UHILL). My research examines the long-run history of labor markets, wages, income inequality, and the geography of economic development, mostly in Sweden, from the nineteenth century to the present.
I work with newly digitized records on individual people: census sheets, tax rolls, wage lists. With modern statistical methods I ask how industrialization, technological change, and policy shaped who prospered and who fell behind. I received my PhD from Uppsala University in 2017 and have since been a visiting scholar at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (CAMPOP), the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), and Carlos III University of Madrid.
News
- 2026New working paper: “The Early Evolution of Segregation and Neighborhood Disadvantage: Evidence from Stockholm during Industrialization, 1878–1950” (with Martin Önnerfors).
- 2026New working paper with the UHILL team on using AI to automatically transcribe historical censuses.
- 2025“Unions and the Great Leveling: Evidence from Across the Atlantic,” a new working paper with William Skoglund.
- 2025“How Deep Are the Roots of Swedish Egalitarianism?” published in the European Review of Economic History (with Johan Ericsson).
- 2025“What Happened to the Rich during the Great Levelling?” published in the Journal of Economic History (with Erik Bengtsson).
- 2025“Did Cities Increase Skills during Industrialization?” published in the Journal of Urban Economics (with Jonatan Andersson).
What I’m working on
The project I’m spending most of my time on right now is Cities and Socio-Economic Segregation over the Long Run, 1880–2017. With a small team I’m piecing together more than a century of geocoded, individual-level records to see who lived where in Swedish cities, and how the map of rich and poor was redrawn as the country industrialized and built the welfare state. An early study from it, on Stockholm’s neighborhoods 1878–1950, is now out as a working paper.
Selected publications all publications →
- “Did Cities Increase Skills during Industrialization? Evidence from Rural-Urban Migration” (with Jonatan Andersson), Journal of Urban Economics, 148 (2025).
- “What Happened to the Rich during the Great Levelling? Evidence from Swedish Individual-level Data, 1909–1950” (with Erik Bengtsson), Journal of Economic History (2025).
- “Incomes and Income Inequality in Stockholm, 1870–1970: Evidence from Micro Data” (with Erik Bengtsson), Explorations in Economic History, 92 (2024).
- “Intergenerational Mobility in Sweden Before the Welfare State” (with Thor Berger, Per Engzell & Björn Eriksson), Journal of Economic History, 83(2) (2023).
- “More Power to the People: Electricity Adoption, Technological Change and Social Conflict” (with Kerstin Enflo & Tobias Karlsson), Journal of Economic History, 81(2) (2021).
- “Economic Growth and the Development of Real Wages: Swedish Construction Workers’ Wages in Comparative Perspective, 1831–1900” (with Johan Ericsson), Journal of Economic History, 80(3) (2020).
UHILL
I direct UHILL at the Department of Economic History in Uppsala. We are a group of researchers and students who turn archival records into datasets and use them to ask how inequality and working life in Sweden have changed since the industrial era. If you are a student interested in these themes, do get in touch.