Sensitivity of coherent anti-Stokes Raman lineshape to time asymmetry of laser pulses

We show that coherent anti-Stokes Raman lineshapes do not follow known spectral profiles if the time asymmetry of realistic laser pulses is taken into account. Examples are given for nanosecond and picosecond laser pulses commonly employed in frequency-resolved coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering. More remarkably, the analysis suggests an effect of line narrowing in comparison to the customary approach, based primarily on the Voigt lineshape.Comment: 8 pages, 3 short sections, 4 figure

The politics of profits: Profit squeeze and political-economic change in Sweden, 1975–1985

In the late 1970s, the Swedish economy faced a profit squeeze which threatened to hamper investments and hence the creation of jobs. This engendered a massive debate in the media and among economists and policymakers. This paper investigates the discussion of “the politics of profits”, the policy measures directed towards manipulating the distribution between capital income and labour income in the Swedish economy from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. The paper indicates that the capital-labour distribution varied significantly over time and that this became a major issue of debate, and shows the relevance of “the politics of profits” for analyses of economic policy change in the 1970s and 1980s

The Changing Meaning of the Wage Bargaining Round in Sweden since the 1960s: A Contextual Approach to Shifts in Industrial Relations

Sweden is renowned for its centralized wage bargaining system, which has been studied for decades from the point of view of inflation, wage differentials and unemployment. A coordinated system in place since 1997 has been compared to the centralized system of the postwar era, while other scholars have pointed to differences in how the institutions work in practice. This paper studies media coverage of wage bargaining rounds in the 1950s-1960s and in the 2000s-2010s to investigate the social understanding of what the wage bargaining institutions are supposed to do. The results indicate that the operation of the wage bargaining system in the 2000s and that in the post-war era are in fact understood very differently: while widely shared aims for wage bargaining rounds in the 1950s and 1960s were to a high degree formulated by the trade unions, trade union influence over the agenda was significantly weaker in the 2000s and 2010s, when external experts, not the least from the financial sector, were to a much higher degree used to define and formulate what good bargaining outcomes would be

The Evolution of Popular Politics in Nineteenth Century Sweden and the Road from Oligarchy to Democracy

In the mid-twentieth century, Sweden distinguished itself as one of the most organized and participatory democracies in the world, with high levels of voting turnout and party membership. But in the late nineteenth century the situation was much the opposite – Sweden had for Western Europe a low degree of suffrage, and low political participation. To explain the turnaround, this paper explores extra-parliamentary political activity in the period of the very exclusive two-chamber system of 1866. The contribution of the paper is to explore and describe the evolution of political meetings in Sweden in the final third of the nineteenth century and in this way provide an analysis of the evolution of a democratic political culture, which widened the scope of those who could act and participate politically. The empirical material consists of digitalized newspapers from the south of Sweden in the period 1866 to 1900, studying about 2,700 articles that mention “popular meetings”, folkmöten, which was the contemporary description of political meetings. The findings highlight the existence of a farmer-centred democratic critique in the 1860s and 1870s, which combined proposals for widened suffrage locally and nationally with criticisms of banks and the bureaucracy. In the1880s and 1890s, the social base of the folkmöten widened as urban workers – socialist and anti-socialist – took a greater part, and the ideological composition of the meetings became more heterogeneous. The systematic investigation of newspaper coverage shows that folkmöten were numerous and involved large numbers of people. This indicates that the Swedish population was more politically active than one would infer from looking at the electoral participation, which captures only the activity of the enfranchised, a minority of the population. The folkmöten was a major arena for democratic socialization in a country with an oligarchical political system

Incomes and Income Inequality in Stockholm, 1870–1970: Evidence from Micro Data

This paper builds on a new dataset from the population register, comprising 38,022 randomly sampled Stockholm residents. The register was also the income tax list, with information about people’s incomes of various types, age, and household composition, in the years 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1940 and 1950. We use this dataset, along with the census of 1930, which uniquely included income information, and a Statistics Sweden random sample for 1960 and 1970, to calculate the growth and distribution of incomes in Stockholm over a hundred years. The Gini coefficient between 1870 and 1920 was high for both individuals and households, around 60-70 and with no change statistically significant at the 95 percent level. After 1920 inequality fell quite steadily for every benchmark year. The top decile’s share of incomes (among households) fell from 50 percent or higher in 1870–1920 to less than 40 percent in 1930 and around 30 percent in 1950. The equalization was driven not only by gains for middle income groups, but also by gains for the bottom half of the distribution. Women constituted the larger share of the bottom half of income earners. Domestic servants, the single largest group in the city, earned very little but reduced their share of working-class jobs from 45 percent in 1870 to 10 percent in 1950. Generally, upgrading jobs was an important way of reducing income inequality. Decomposing the inequality decline from 1920 to 1950 between age, gender, class and sector of occupation shows that class was by far the largest determinant of inequality and of its decline

Long-run evolution of income inequality in the Nordic countries

This paper surveys Nordic historic studies on the distribution of income to highlight similarities and differences between Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in the evolution of income concentration and income inequality over more than 140 years. Our descriptive analysis allows for a decomposition where we identify the contribution of the income share of the richest 1 per cent and the distribution of income among the other 99 per cent to overall inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient. The results show that the evolution of income concentration and inequality can be characterised by episodes rather than by secular cycles, which means that the evolution can neither be summarised by Kuznets’ inverse U nor by a U. The evidence on the role played by the share of the top 1 per cent for overall income inequality shows to be mixed and to vary across time and countries.publishedVersio

The living standards of the labouring classes in Sweden, 1750-1900: evidence from probate inventories

We present new estimates of the living standards among the rural labouring classes in Sweden from 1750 to 1900. Starting with a database of more than 1,000 probate inventories of rural, landless and semi-landless people from the years 1750, 1800, 1850 and 1900, we study the development for crofters in particular. In a sub-sample of 120 probate inventories we map in great detail the material items of the crofter households, focusing especially on two categories: the means of production (animals and agricultural tools) and consumption goods. The crofters held over time fewer means of production but more consumption goods: glass, porcelain, mirrors, and clocks become more common. However, the decrease in means of production indicates a greater dependence on wage labour, rising land prices made it more difficult to become a farmer, and housing standards stayed poor. The study shows the usefulness of probate inventories to study labouring people’s living standards

Financial effects in historic consumption and investment functions

The global financial crisis has highlighted the importance of financial factors on economic performance. Most of the existing research analyses the post-World War 2 experience, and especially the 1980s onwards. This paper investigates the effects of stock prices, real estate prices and debt on consumption and investment expenditures by estimating consumption and investment equations for long historic datasets with about 100 years of data for Britain, France, Norway and Sweden. We find positive debt effects on consumption in three of four countries, but no consistent effects of share prices and house prices. We find positive effects of share prices on investment in all four countries. Effects are stronger in more market-based Britain than in more state-oriented France. For France, Sweden and Norway we find some evidence that effects of financial variables were weaker in the postwar period 1945-80. These findings suggest that the institutional context matters for how financial variables affect economic activity

What Happened to the Incomes of the Rich during the Great Levelling? Evidence from Swedish Individual-level Data, 1909–1950

Much of the income equalization that took place during the first half of the twentieth century was driven by shifts in the shares of the incomes of the rich, such as the top 1 percent. But the available studies using tabulated data have not been wholly able to account for the relative decline in top earners’ incomes. In this paper, we present the first evidence on the composition of the top groups from the Belle Epoque to the early post-WW2 period. Using information on 21,055 individual tax-payers in two elite areas in greater Stockholm, we show that the absolute top stratum (the richest 0.1 percent) was dominated by an economic elite of CEOs and bankers, while a remarkably large fraction of the top 1 percent consisted of professionals such as medical doctors and engineers. There was a distinction within the elite between capital-rich “rentiers” and those affluent whose income came from wages and business. The incomes of the top stratum were built on the ownership or leadership of companies producing mass consumption goods, machinery, or banking and insurance. We relate the peak of income inequality in the first quarter of the twentieth century to the historical circumstances of a globalized economy with growing mass markets in all the industrializing countries. These circumstances, jointly with an economic policy that was still relatively laissez faire allowed great fortunes to be accumulated. In the 1920s and 1930s policy turned away from globalization and to stronger regulation, at the same time as steeper competition and growing unionization undermined the super profits of the previous quarter- century. Increased state interventionism in the economy and an expansive education policy also undermined the high relative incomes of professionals; we document the declining advantages of professions such as medical doctors, pharmacists, and lawyers when compared with the average income throughout the period