Exploring regional wage dispersion in Swedish manufacturing, 1860–2009

Labour and the ‘law of one price’: regional wage convergence of farm workers in Sweden, 1757–1980

“…The converging wages that stretched from the industrial breakthrough to the First World War, shown in Table 6, correspond with the results of previous studies on Finland (Heikkinen, 1997), Sweden (Enflo et al, 2014), and Britain (Hunt, 1973;Söderberg, 1985). Furthermore, the pattern of wage dispersion among agrarian workers found in our study corresponds well with what we found in a previous study of manufacturing workers in Sweden: convergence in 1860-1912and 1931-1983, and divergence in 1912-1931(Collin et al, 2019. For the rest of this section, we delve into the historical context of the regional wage spread of farm workers, especially in relation to markets and institutions.…”

“…1 Yet studies that look into the regional labour markets of the past have seldom found fully equalised wages, probably because workers have not met the mobility criterion, which in turn indicates that the necessary requirements for labour mobility were not satisfied. 2 Few studies stretch across wide time spans, but they provide evidence that regional wages seem to have converged since pre-industrial times, for the distribution of wages across space in the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century is rather flat (Collin, Lundh, & Prado, 2019). One explanation for the convergence of regional wages is likely to be found in radical improvements in transports and communications that took place in the latter half of the nineteenth century and hence favoured labour mobility.…”

“…In addition, the wage series must also capture a wide time span, otherwise one might detect only brief spells of a convergence process subject to recurrent swings and temporary setbacks. Barring a recent study of manufacturing workers (Collin et al, 2019), researchers have thus far relied on regional wage series that span over half a century at most. As a result of the short time frames of previous studies, our knowledge about the long-term behaviour of regional wages is scanty.…”

“…In a similar study on manufacturing workers (Collin et al, 2019), the cost-of-living index was based on food prices and housing costs. We chose not to include the series on housing cost here because it is based mainly on city prices that would not be representative of the levels and the variation in rural housing costs.…”

Economic Growth and the Development of Real Wages: Swedish Construction Workers’ Wages in Comparative Perspective, 1831–1900

“…See alsoEnflo and Rosés (2015) andCollin, Lundh, and Prado (2018) for a similar explanation for the strong rate of real wage convergence.…”