Erik Bengtsson

Erik Bengtsson is Senior Lecturer of Economic History at Lund University in Sweden. His research interests include economic inequality, historical political economy, welfare states and labour markets. He will spend April 2026 in Paris working on new micro data driven approaches to the evolution of economic inequality in the late 1800s and first half of the twentieth century.

The project

Title: Top incomes, inequality and economic change: Sweden, 1911–1950

"The purpose of this project is to explore the relationship between structural economic change and economic inequality, through a case study of Sweden from 1911 to 1950. By 'structual economic change', we refer specifically to two things: changes in the sectoral composition of an economy, and the skills composition of the jobs that are created and that disappear. We use a machine learning method to create a dataset of about 1 million top income earners in Sweden from 1911 to 1950, building on published taxation calendars. We complement this dataset with an already existing 1 percent sample representative of all Swedish taxpayers every tenth year 1870 to 1950. With these two datasets, we get a uniquely granular view of the income distribution in a long-run, historical economic setting, for an economy undergoing industrialization, urbanization, expansion of the educational system, and equalization of the income structure. We study the importance of the financial sector, executives, and entrepreneurs for the top incomes and the total income distribution. With the 1 percent sample, we study the implications of the creation and destruction of various kinds of jobs -- low- medium- and high-skilled jobs -- for incomes and income inequality. With our novel datasets and an analytical perspective which unites the economics of growth with the study of inequality, the project makes theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to the study of income distribution."

Hosting institution: Paris School of Economics

Selective Bibliography

• "The Politics of Profits: Profit Squeeze, Macroeconomic Expertise and Economic Policy, Sweden 1975–1985". Forthcoming in the Journal of Contemporary History; pre-published online 1 December 2025.
• "The Social Origins of Democracy and Authoritarianism Reconsidered: Prussia and Sweden in Comparison".  With Felix Kersting, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Comparative Political Studies, Volume 59, No. 5, pp. 979–1009, February 2026.
• "Wealth, Work and Industriousness 1670–1860: Evidence from Rural Swedish Probates". With Marcus Falk and Mats Olsson, both Lund. Rural History, Volume 36, Issue 2 , October 2025, pp. 278-294.  
• "What Happened to the Rich during the Great Levelling? Evidence from Swedish Individual-level Data, 1909–1950". With Jakob Molinder, Uppsala University. Journal of Economic History Volume 82, No. 2, pp. 411-441, July 2025.
• "Incomes and Income Inequality in Stockholm, 1870–1970: Evidence from Micro Data". With Jakob Molinder, Uppsala University. Explorations in Economic History, Volume 92, April 2024, article no 101568.