updated May 2020

I study the relationships between different types of wage earners in the early modern Swedish economy, with the goal of understanding participation in and the development of the waged economy, and what these developments meant for households. I move beyond macro historical wages studies that look only at men’s day wages toward a more nuanced perspective.

My research is motivated by the desire to understand the changes in living standards and how people put together a household income in the past. I further extend the research frontier to groups which have tended to be less visible in the historical record.

Publications

“Men at Work. Wages and industriousness in southern Sweden 1500–1850”, with Mats Olsson. Scandinavian Economics History Review 68:2, Jan 2020.

“Business as usual: Nobility and landed estates in Sweden”, with Mats Olsson. Essays in Economic & Business History, May 2017.

Dissertation: Work, Wages and Income: Remuneration and Labor Patterrns in Sweden 1500-1850

Working papers

The distinct seasonality of early modern casual labor and the short durations of
individual working years: Sweden 1500-1800.

Constructing Equality? Women’s wages for physical labor, 1550-1759.
A shorter version of the paper, which was awarded the New Researchers’s Prize at the 2017 EHS Annual Conference, can be read here.

On the construction of nominal and real wage series: Southern Sweden 1500-1850.

Works in progress

Day and annual wages of women in early modern Sweden

Seasonal labor patterns throughout early modern Europe. With Judy Stephenson, Patrick Wallis, Ernesto Lopéz, and Mario García-Zúñiga

Women’s and families’ work and income patterns in 1740 Stockholm With Jakob Mollinder and Christopher Phil

Blog posts

Income and the household: women’s work and wages in early modern Sweden, based on women’s day wages in Swedish construction.

Constructing Equality? Women’s wages, physical labor, and demand factors in Sweden 1550-1759, a shorter blog post based on women’s wages and work patterns in Sweden.

Prior work

Master’s thesis: Wages in Comparison. Scandinavia in the early modern period: Evidence from Scania. Preliminary work on wages in the south of Sweden in the early modern period. Spring 2014.