Browsing by Author "Collin, Kristoffer"

Filter results by typing the first few letters
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Industrial wages in mid-1880s Sweden: estimations beyond Bagge’s Wages in Sweden. Data, source and methods
    (2019-09) Hamark, Jesper; Collin, Kristoffer
    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.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Regional wages and labour market integration in Sweden, 1732–2009
    (2016-11-25) Collin, Kristoffer
    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.