IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ereveh/v17y2013i2p171-189.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

To navigate the family economy over a lifetime: life-cycle squeezes in pre-industrial Swedish towns

Author

Listed:
  • Kristina Lilja
  • Dan Bäcklund

Abstract

Studies have shown that children's incomes were important for working-class families during industrialization. We found that, even before industrialization, having children greatly affected the family economy of workers and master artisans. For workers, having children necessitated borrowing, but also made it easier later to pay off debts and accumulate wealth. They seem to have put into practice some sort of 'saving through children'. For master artisans, running a business generally was a more important determinant of debts and assets over a lifetime, but, as adolescents, children positively affected wealth, probably because they provided cheap and flexible labour in the households and workshops. Copyright , Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Kristina Lilja & Dan Bäcklund, 2013. "To navigate the family economy over a lifetime: life-cycle squeezes in pre-industrial Swedish towns," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 17(2), pages 171-189, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ereveh:v:17:y:2013:i:2:p:171-189
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ereh/het002
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Livio Di Matteo, 2016. "Wealth Distribution and the Canadian Middle Class: Historical Evidence and Policy Implications," Canadian Public Policy, University of Toronto Press, vol. 42(2), pages 132-151, June.
    2. Zuijderduijn, Jaco, 2016. "The Ages of Women and Men : Life Cycles, Family and Investment in the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries," Lund Papers in Economic History 150, Lund University, Department of Economic History.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ereveh:v:17:y:2013:i:2:p:171-189. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/ereh .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.