Skills and Prospects: Labor Market Conditions and Technological Change During Swedish Industrialization

Study 1: The Swedish Guilds and The Skill Premium: Evidence From Construction Worker Wages

A long-withstanding discussion within economic history has been the role of institutional change in shaping inequality and economic development before and during processes of modernization. In this paper, I contribute to this debate by considering the impact of the Swedish guild system on the skill premium. For long, scholars have debated whether the legal restrictions imposed on trade and labor market mobility by the Swedish guild legislation impaired commerce and occupational mobility. Hindering an efficient allocation of labor by restricting entry to the crafts, and therefore increasing the cost of skilled labor. To estimate the impact of the legislation I exploit the dissolution of the Swedish guild system in 1846 and the implementation of freedom of trade in 1864 as policy interventions using a difference-in-difference research design where I utilize spatial weights to account for potential spillover effects. The preliminary results suggest that the guilds had no significant impact on the skill premium during the nineteenth-century

Study 2: The Technology-Task Complementarity in Sweden 1864-1924: Within-Occupational Change in an Industrializing Economy

This paper aims to disentangle the technology-task complementarity in Sweden 1864-1924 to provide a more detailed perspective on how the demand for skills responds to technological change in an industrializing economy. This is done by observing whether innovation induced change in within-occupational task content. Change in task content is observed by applying textual analysis methods on job advertisements from old Swedish newspapers and worker autobiographies, while the impact of technological change is analyzed by calculating patent density by sector and analyzing if increasing patent density induced change in task content. We will then link the task data and the patent data to Swedish census data to estimate the impact of changes in task content and patent density on occupational structure. This study thus complements discussions on whether industrialization initially led to de-skilling by investigating the association between the introduction of repetitive tasks, innovation, and the hollowing out of mid-skilled jobs

Participating researcher:

• Jakob Molinder