Johan Ericsson

Uppsala History of Inequality and Labor Lab (UHILL) - Uppsala University At the Uppsala History of Inequality and Labor Lab (UHILL), we are focused on the study of economic inequality, migration, and labor markets, from the industrial period to the present.

Three PhD. positions at economic history in Uppsala are now open, one of which is associated with Uppsala history of inequality and labor lab (UHILL): www.uu.se/en/research/...

Got some new funding to work on the labor market effects of demolishing and rebuilding of parts of Stockholms inner city in the mid 1900s. Together with @johangericsson.bsky.social, @jakobmolinder.bsky.social and Jonatan Andersson.

Union wage effects in Sweden: Evidence from the interwar period In this paper, I use a new plant-level dataset to investigate the relationship between wages and the regional strength of unions. Using a shift-share …

I published my first paper, read it, cite it, love it!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Uppsala History of Inequality and Labor Lab (UHILL) - Uppsala University At the Uppsala History of Inequality and Labor Lab (UHILL), we are focused on the study of economic inequality, migration, and labor markets, from the industrial period to the present.

Glad att vara en del av UHILL, ett nytt initiativ för forskning om historiska arbetsmarknader och ojämlikhet.

www.uu.se/en/research/...

In summary, using household budget surveys with a large number of respondents show that while male wage rates underestimate total household income, they seem to work pretty well for cross-country comparisons as long as we use urban wage rates. To read more you can follow this link shorturl.at/VvtHu

Using calorific availability as a proxy for living standards, I show that Swedish urban and rural households were very similar, and they were also very similar to British urban households. This is also what we find in traditional real wage studies comparing Sweden and Britain in this period.

This means that if we use urban and rural male wages, the income shares differ between countries, but not if we only use urban wages. But how representative are urban wages? What about the urban-rural wage gap? It turns out that it was very small when accounting for total household income.

What about urban-rural differences? Scandinavia was much more rural than Britain at this time. Unfortunately, only Sweden and Denmark included rural workers, but for them, the wage of the household head constituted a much smaller share of total household incomes, roughly 70%.

Instead, I used early 20th century household budget surveys from Scandinavia and Britain to see if relative standards change if we include incomes from other sources than the wages of the male household head. As this figure for urban households show, additional incomes were similar across countries.

This can certainly be an issue, but if the bias is similar across countries, real wages can still be used for cross-country comparisons. The only recent study that has looked into this indicates that countries differed in additional income shares. This is based on quite few data points however.

The background is that several papers have argued that male real wages are not reliable as indicators of living standards as they are often based on day rates from one single sector and doesn't include additional incomes from other family members.

What better first post than to introduce a new working paper I'm working on! In this paper I address the question of the reliability of men's real wages as indicators of living standards. The short answer is that they seem to work reasonably well, at least for cross-country comparisons.