EKH Makromackan seminar: Suvi Heikkuri

On Tuesday 8 September the autumn semester's first Makromackan seminar takes place. Suvi Heikkuri, postdoc at the University of Gothenburg, will present ongoing research, co-authored with Jakob Molinder of Uppsala University: "Building the Middle: Occupational Restructuring and Income Inequality in Sweden, 1880–1970"

Suvi Heikkuri -- sites.google.com 

Building the Middle: Occupational Restructuring and Income Inequality in Sweden, 1880–1970

Abstract: The transformation of occupational structures during industrialization fundamentally reshaped both the distribution of employment and the income hierarchy of industrial societies. While research on occupational change has primarily documented shifts in employment patterns across sectors, we examine how these structural transformations directly affected income distribution and the emergence of middle class within and across sectors.
Using harmonized census microdata covering 1880–1970, we track the evolution of Sweden's occupational structure over nine decades. We implement a multi-stage harmonization procedure combining rule-based preprocessing, fuzzy matching, and large language models to standardize historical occupational strings. By linking these occupational classifications to individual-level income tax records (Bengtsson et al. 2021), we observe how earnings varied within and across occupational categories, skill levels, and social classes over time. Crucially, our harmonization approach preserves detailed occupational titles beneath the HISCO level, enabling us to examine compositional change within broad occupational categories—for example, how the specific types of factory workers, clerks, or engineers evolved over time—and to track the income trajectories of specific occupations as they moved up or down the occupational ladder. This allows us to move beyond employment shares to examine how occupational restructuring shaped income distribution.