Research

William Skoglund

I am a post-doctoral researcher at the Economic History Department at Lund Unviersity and affiliated with Uppsala History of Inequality and Labor Lab (UHILL) as well as the Institute for Urban and Housing Research (IBF) at Uppsala University. My research interests focus on historical inequality, wage growth, labor markets and unions. In my research I use historical microdata to answer questions about the role of power in the labor market, the determinants of inequality, and institutional as well as structural change in the labor market.

Email: william.skoglund@ekhist.uu.se

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Published articles:

The Union Wage Effect at the Dawn of the Great Levelling: Evidence from interwar Sweden

Published at Explorations in Economic History

In this paper I use a new plant-level dataset to investigate the relationship between wages and the regional strength of unions. Using a shift-share, or ’Bartik’, instrumental variables approach I disentangle the causal effect of union strength on wage levels. I find statistically and economically significant, heterogenous, union wage effects for men with the bottom of the distribution being impacted by union density and the top two thirds being unaffected. I find a negative effect around the median for women and argue that unions in general were uninterested in the women’s issue and were organisations mostly by men, for men. The paper contributes to the literature by providing the only evidence of a union wage effect in Sweden and perhaps the earliest union wage effect found anywhere - highlighting the importance of unions in shaping labor market outcomes in the early 20th century and showing that union wage effects have to be understood in their historical context.

Work in progress:

Bargaining for a Bite: Exploring the Evolution of Collective Bargaining in Sweden

In this paper I investigate the evolution and importance of a key labor market institution in Sweden: the collective bargaining agreement. I follow national-level collective bargaining in three sectors throughout the 20th century, arguing that national-level collective bargaining became increasingly important in Sweden during the post-World War II era when the minimum wage bite rose together with bargaining coverage. During the later half of the 20th century national-level collective bargaining became increasingly egalitarian and abolished differentiated rates for men and women as well as regional differences, they also lowered the skill premiums in the agreements over time. Using individual-level data on workers in the Engineering sector I utilize a shock to minimum wages in low-wage regions and show that this increase in minimum wages was associated with higher hourly wages.

Link to working paper coming soon

Labor Market Concentration during Industrialization

With Jakob Molinder, Johan Ericsson & Thor Berger

In this article we use new and detailed data on plant-level employment to calculate labor market concentration in manufacturing over the course of industrialization in Sweden (1863-1939). We calculate a Herfindahl-Hirschmann index for local and regional labor markets, showing that labor market concentration was very high at the start of industrialization, especially in smaller regions. Concentration declined across the board, and as migration accelerated from rural to urban areas, where labor markets were more competitive, an increased share of the population lived in a competitive labor market. We combine our data on concentration with individual-level data from the 1930 census to estimate the effect of concentration on incomes. We find that there’s a negative effect on total earnings that is both statistically and economically significant. The effect of labor market concentration on incomes was also heterogeneous across skill-groups. We document larger negative effects on incomes for high- and medium-skilled individuals than we do for low- and unskilled individuals.

Unions and the Great Leveling: Evidence from Across the Atlantic

With Jakob Molinder

We investigate the role of unionization in shaping income distributions during the Great Leveling, comparing Sweden and the United States—two countries with markedly different union traditions and levels of organization. Using data from the 1940 and 1950 U.S. Censuses and newly compiled Swedish tax registers for the same years, we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in unionization through a Bartik-style strategy and estimate distributional effects using quantile regressions and interactions with worker characteristics. Our results indicate that stronger unions elevated earnings in both countries, but the elasticity was roughly double in United States compared with Sweden. U.S. unions also had a more radical impact on the earnings distribution: the effect at the 10th percentile was almost twice that at the 90th percentile while also reducing earnings differences between workers with different levels of skill and education. We relate the difference between the two countries to their patterns of union membership: in the United States it was concentrated among lower-skilled workers, whereas in Sweden it was high across the occupational distribution and among employees with both low and high levels of education, shaping their incentives to negotiate higher wages and to compress the earnings distribution. Taken together, our study shows that unions played a pivotal role in the Great Leveling in two countries at opposite ends of the labor-market-regime continuum. While there appears to be a trade-off between unions’ organizational reach and their impact on wage differentials, Sweden’s more encompassing unions have ultimately been more successful in engendering a compressed income distribution, whereas U.S. unions have gradually lost their power to affect these outcomes.

Working paper at the ehes

Under review:

The Sonoran Land Grab: Development of Wealth in 19th Century Sonora

With Diego Castañeda Garza and Jonatan Andersson.

R&R at the Economic History of Developing Regions

In this article, we investigate the effect of encroachment policies on wealth in late 19th century conducted by the Mexican state in the state of Sonora. Using a novel database of will inventories from the Mexican state of Sonora, we find that the upper-class saw large wealth gains as a result of access to new agricultural land and irrigation. We argue that encroachment policies had a substantial effect on wealth but that this effect is heterogenous across social groups. We highlight the role of institutions in shaping wealth and inequality in the early periods of American economic development.

Link to working paper.

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