IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ereveh/v19y2015i1p67-87..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Markets and politics: the Swedish urban–rural wage gap, 1865–1985

Author

Listed:
  • Christer Lundh
  • Svante Prado

Abstract

The persistence of a significant urban–rural wage gap challenges the notion of competitive equilibrium. This paper examines the earnings gap between urban and rural workers in Sweden between 1865 and 1985. Proper measurement by cost-of-living, working hours and unemployment causes most of the nominal gap to disappear. What remains is a long-run equilibrium that was interrupted by major external shocks in the interwar years when the urban wage premium soared. The increase in the wage gap stemmed from asymmetric labor market responses to the external shocks, explained by the dissimilar institutional configurations of the two labor markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Christer Lundh & Svante Prado, 2015. "Markets and politics: the Swedish urban–rural wage gap, 1865–1985," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 19(1), pages 67-87.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ereveh:v:19:y:2015:i:1:p:67-87.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ereh/heu022
    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. Mafie, Gabriel K. & Hahn, Youjin & Yang, Hee-Seung, 2021. "Does Education Play a Role in Explaining the Rural‒Urban Wealth Gap? Evidence from Tanzania," Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics, Hitotsubashi University, vol. 62(2), pages 162-177, December.
    2. Bengtsson, Erik & Prado, Svante, 2019. "The rise of the middle class: The income gap between salaried employees and workers in Sweden, 1830-1935," Lund Papers in Economic History 186, 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:19:y:2015:i:1:p:67-87.. 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.