EKH Seminar: Olle Hammar

On 4 November Olle Hammar, Assistant Professor of Economics at Linnaeus University, will present ongoing research at the Economic History department seminar. Hammar will present a paper co-authored with Paula Roth (Institutet för Näringslivsforskning) and Daniel Waldenström (Institutet för Näringslivsforskning), "The Swedish Income Distribution, 1968–2016". See abstract below.

Olle Hammar -- personal website

The Swedish Income Distribution, 1968–2016

Abstract

We provide new evidence on income inequality levels and trends in Sweden from 1968 to 2016. By combining data from tax and population registers, we construct a new dataset that includes the distribution of pre-tax total and post-tax disposable income from labor, business, capital, transfers and benefits, for the full Swedish population since 1968. As such, we can also compare income inequality for both individuals and various household concepts. Our estimates extend Statistics Sweden’s official inequality series based on full-population registers (available since 2011) by more than four decades. Our results indicate that the 1980s was the decade with the lowest level of overall income inequality in Sweden (as measured by the Gini coefficient), while income inequality as measured by top income shares for the very top (top 0.001%) has increased steadily over the studied period.