Welcome!
Welcome!
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I am a PhD candidate in Economics at Lund University, specializing in political economy, economic development, and economic history. I study the political economy of institutions and culture. My research combines historical microdata, text analysis, and machine learning to understand how information, elite behavior, and collective beliefs shape economic and political development.
I will be on the 2025/2026 academic job market.
I hold a M.Sc. in Economics (2020) and a M.Sc. in Economic and Social History (2019), both from University of Helsinki.
You can contact me at teppo.lindfors@nek.lu.se.
Working Papers
Working Papers
Job market paper
Job market paper
This paper examines how a shift in collective sentiment, triggered by the 1917 Russian Revolution, drove Finland into civil war. I show that the abolition of Imperial censorship and the diffusion of revolutionary communication from Petrograd, transmitted through Russian telegraph stations and echoed in Finnish newspapers, transformed the information environment and sparked a surge of public opposition. Analyzing millions of newspaper articles together with interrogation records, prisoner registers, death records, and census-linked data, I find that opposition rhetoric increased participation mainly by shifting beliefs about the likelihood of success rather than altering intrinsic motives. Municipalities exposed to stronger rhetoric experienced early mobilization by ideologically motivated rebels who formed a revolutionary vanguard, followed by a broader participation of conformists. Census-based measures of peer mobilization at the street level reveal strong local interdependence in enlistment, and evidence on enlistment timing shows that participation responded dynamically to recent peer actions. Self-reported rebel motives further indicate that conformity and social pressure were pervasive, with about two-fifths of rebels citing communal expectations as reasons for joining. Government repression, however, exerted a powerful demobilizing effect that public opposition could not offset.
Networks of Nation-Building: Evidence from the Fennoman Movement
Networks of Nation-Building: Evidence from the Fennoman Movement
We study how elites shape nation-building by examining Finland's nineteenth-century national awakening. After Finland's transition from Swedish to Russian Empire in 1809, an influential fraction of Finland's remaining Swedish-speaking elites led the Fennoman movement to promote Finnish language and identity. Using newly compiled elite biographies and historical student registers, we construct individual- and family-level networks to study the anatomy of elite-led national awakening. We document five results: (1) the most central elite families were more likely to adopt nationalist behavior, consistent with seeking to preserve influence under the new political order; (2) national awakening diffused through links in the elite network, propagating from more central to less central actors; (3) at the local level, elites' nationalist behavior also fostered the adoption of national identity among non-elites measured as naming patterns, voting for nationalistic parties, and newspaper subscriptions; and (4) increased elite-founded national unity later translated into greater demand for institutional change. These findings show how a national awakening can spread through elite networks to the broader population, and that influential elites’ choices regarding nation-building can have lasting consequences for national cohesion and institutional development.
Basque: Language, Segregation and Identity
Basque: Language, Segregation and Identity
Language policies often aim to foster national cohesion by broadening the use of a common tongue, yet it remains unclear whether expanding a language alone—without changes to other institutions—can reshape cultural identity. We examine this question in a context where the legal status of a language varied sharply across localities while curricula, media, and other public institutions stayed uniform. We focus on Navarre, Spain, where a 1986 law assigned Basque three different legal statuses across adjoining zones. Using a difference-in-differences design across successive birth cohorts, we find that the reform increased Basque-language proficiency by up to 50 percentage points. The impact on identity, however, depends on segregation. Although learning Basque raises the likelihood of identifying as Basque, cohort-level identity rises only where school segregation is limited and falls where linguistic sorting is pronounced. Survey evidence on friendship networks supports a contact mechanism: in highly sorted areas, students educated in Spanish report few Basque-speaking friends.
CV
CV
You can find my CV here.
Teaching
Teaching
Master's level
Applied International Macroeconomics (Lecturer; Lund University)
Advanced Microeconomic Analysis (TA; Lund University)
Quantitative Methods for Master Students (TA; University of Helsinki)
Undergraduate level
Development Economics (TA; Lund University)
Introductory Macroeconomics (TA; Lund University)
Quantitative Methods for Undergraduate Students (TA; University of Helsinki)
Contact
Contact
Email: teppo.lindfors@nek.lu.se
Postal address:
Lund UniversityDepartment of EconomicsTycho Brahes väg 1, 223 62 Lund, SwedenRoom EC1:262Page updated
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