NEW ARTICLE. Rolf Aaberge and I have published a new survey article on "Long-run evolution of income inequality in the Nordic countries" in the Scandinavian Economic History Review. (November 2023) Read here.

NEW GRANT. I am a small part of the project "From political apathy to democracy: Investigating the role of popular movements in Sweden’s democratization", with Professor Magnus Wennerhag as PI, which has been awarded funding by the Swedish Research Council. I will make some political history research within this project, in 2025/2026. (November 2023)

NEW WORKING PAPER. “Wealth, work, and industriousness, 1670–1860: Evidence from rural Swedish probates”. With Marcus Falk and Mats Olsson. Lund Papers in Economic History No. 251. Read here. (September 2023)

NEW WORKING PAPER. “The politics of profits: Profit squeeze and political-economic change in Sweden, 1975–1985”. Lund Papers in Economic History No. 250. Read here. (September 2023)

NEW WORKING PAPER. “The Changing Meaning of the Wage Bargaining Round in Sweden since the 1960s: A Contextual Approach to Shifts in Industrial Relations”. Lund Papers in Economic History No. 245.  Read here (January 2023).

NEW ARTICLE. “The Evolution of Popular Politics in 19th-Century Sweden and the Road From Oligarchy to Democracy”. Journal of Modern European History, volume 21, no. 1, pp. 71-89. Open access, read here (December 2022)

Hello, welcome to my web site. 

My name is Erik Bengtsson. I am an economic historian, working at Lund University. (work website here). My job title is senior lecturer (universitetslektor) and my degree is docent.

My research interests are especially in two broad fields. One is historical living standards, material culture, wealth and inequality, especially in Europe since the seventeenth century. I have done a lot of research with probate inventories (Swedish and Finnish), and also some with wealth tax data, income tax data, wages, and historical national accounts, looking at the capital-labour division of income. The second field is historical political economy, including political history, focusing on the period c. 1790-1950 but also on politico-economic changes since the 1970s. I am especially interested in social relations as mediated by politics, agrarian politics, and democratization and pre-democratic political systems. The two fields also inter-relate, of course, and at the moment I am for example working on trying to understand the implications of the Mexican Revolution for economic inequality, as well as the connections between democratization and economic inequality in Sweden and Brazil, the connection between democratization and factor shares more generally, and the connections between political change and economic inequality in the Nordic countries since the 1970s.

As of spring 2022, I do research in three projects.

• From 2019 to 2022 I work in the project The Swedish transition to equality: income inequality with new micro data, 1862–1970, financed by grants from Handelsbankens forskningsstiftelser and the Swedish Research Council (grant info). I am the project leader and the two other senior participants are Jakob Molinder (Uppsala) and Svante Prado (Gothenburg). For the project aims see here. In short, we produce a large new individual-level dataset of Swedish incomes for every tenth year 1860-1970, and analyze the development of Swedish incomes and their distribution.

• 2020 to 2025 I work within a large research program led by Jenny Andersson of Uppsala University and financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, "Neoliberalism in the Nordics". Within this program I will work on macroeconomic regulation, wage formation, economic policy and economic inequality since roughly the 1970s, in the Nordic countries. Within this project, I am now working on a paper on the declining salience of the wage bargaining round in Swedish society since the 1960s, a paper on economic experts' real-time analyses of the crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s, and a paper on Swedish billionaires since the 1970s.

• From 2020 to 2023 Marcus Falk, Mats Olsson and I work on a project on living standards and material culture in Sweden c. 1680-1860. This project is funded by a grant from Handelsbankens forskningsstiftelser. I don't do active research in this project -- Marcus does most of that, but I am involved as his doctoral supervisor. Relatedly, I am also involved in a project run by Björn Eriksson on socio-economic inequality and mortality in Sweden from the 1600s to the 1800s.

I have just written a book on the history and development of economic, social and political inequality in Sweden since the eighteenth century: Världens jämlikaste land? The book summarizes and synthesizes a lot of what I've been working on for the last few years, on wealth inequality, wages and incomes, as well as political history. The core argument has also been presented in a paper published in 2019 in Past & Present, available here.

I teach introductory economic history, global and Swedish, and a course called "The rise and fall of the Swedish model". From spring semester 2021 I give a tutorial for masters' students, on historical economic inequality. Since autumn semester 2021 I teach the department's masters level course on research design.

I am the main supervisor for one doctoral student in Economic History, Marcus Falk, and the secondary or third supervisor for four doctoral students in the department: Fredrik Kopsch, Valeria Lukkari, Johanne Arnfred. and Dominic Mealy. Marcus is working on material culture and living standards in Sweden c. 1680-1860, Fredrik on the housing market and rental regulations, Valeria on economic inequality in twentieth century Kenya, Johanne on artisans in nineteenth century Sweden, and Dominic on marketisation since the 1970s. I am also the secondary supervisor for a doctoral student in History, Markus Hansen. Markus is working on the transition to agrarian capitalism in eighteenth century Denmark. I am also the third supervisor for a doctoral student in the History of Ideas, Sarah Vorminder. Sarah is working on eighteenth century enclosures.

I am (since 2023) the book reviews editor of Scandinavian Economic History Review.

I got my PhD in Economic History in Gothenburg in 2013 and moved to Lund as a postdoc in 2015. I've been a visiting scholar at UCLA (2011), the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne (2013), Kingston University (2017, 2018), and the Paris School of Economics (2019, 2022).

Jag är sedan november 2020 invald som arbetande ledamot i Vetenskapssocieteten i Lund.

I have a Swedish-language blog, Bengtzzon, and I am on Twitter as @bengtssonz.

In my spare time I watch sports on TV, play football and tennis, listen to music, go cycling, and drink a glass of wine sometimes.