Research

Most of my projects circle one big question: who gained and who lost as Sweden went from poor agrarian country to wealthy welfare state. Much of the work happens within UHILL, and almost all of it starts the same way: with records about individual people that no one has turned into a dataset before.

Current projects

  • Cities and Socio-Economic Segregation over the Long Run, 1880–2017
    Principal investigator · Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), 2022–.
    Tracing residential sorting and socio-economic segregation in Swedish cities across more than a century, using geocoded individual-level data to see where different social groups lived and how far apart.
  • The Swedish Transition to Equality: Income Inequality with New Micro Data, 1862–1970
    With Erik Bengtsson & Svante Prado · Jan Wallander & Tom Hedelius Foundation and the Swedish Research Council.
    New individual-level income data to chart how Sweden went from a highly unequal society to one of the world’s most equal, and to identify what drove the levelling.
  • Everyone Worked: Work Patterns and Household Labour Allocation in Early Modern Sweden
    With Kathryn Gary & Christopher Pihl · Jan Wallander & Tom Hedelius Foundation.
    Reconstructing how work was organized within households in early modern Sweden, with particular attention to the extent and value of women’s work.
  • Intergenerational Mobility in Sweden Before and After the Welfare State
    With Thor Berger, Björn Eriksson & Per Engzell · Jan Wallander & Tom Hedelius Foundation.
    Linking historical and modern records to measure social mobility across generations and to ask how the rise of the welfare state changed the transmission of advantage.
  • Regulations and the Labour Market in Nineteenth-Century Sweden
    Principal investigator · Jan Wallander & Tom Hedelius Foundation.
    How labour-market regulation shaped wages, mobility, and conflict during Sweden’s industrialization.

Working papers

The newest working papers are on Stockholm’s early segregation, 1878–1950 (EHES 294) and using AI to transcribe historical censuses (EHES 298). Further along the pipeline are A Century of Child Penalties: Evidence from Sweden and Stratification and Inequality: A Century of Social Class and Earnings Dynamics in Sweden. Full details and links are on the Publications page.