Marriage choices and social reproduction

This article studies the relationship between partner selection and socioeconomic status (SES) attainment and mobility in five rural parishes in southern Sweden, 1815-1894. Three different aspects of partner selection are considered: age, social origin, and geographical origin. We use an individual-level database containing information on the SES origin (parental land holding and occupation), age difference, and place of birth of the married couple. The results show a powerful association between partner selection and SES attainment and mobility. Social heterogamy was particularly important, but age heterogamy and geographic exogamy was also clearly related to both SES attainment and mobility.age homogamy, geographic endogamy, intergenerational social mobility, partner selection, social homogamy, socioeconomic attainment

Dealing with Economic Stress Through Migration: Lessons from Nineteenth Century Rural Sweden

Preindustrial society was characterised by vast uncertainties due to harvest failures and fluctuations in prices of basic commodities. These economic fluctuations had severe effects on the standard of living, especially for the poorer segments of the population, as shown for instance, by the increased mortality following economic crises. This article examines the extent to which migration could be used as a measure to deal with economic stress by sending individual family members away, or relocating the entire family. A micro-level approach is taken, where a longitudinal dataset at the individual level is used in the analysis of a rural community in southern Sweden for the period 1829–1866. The results show that landless people did not move in response to economic stress, most likely because of the lack of available alternatives and prohibitively high costs of long-range migration. Thus, migration does not appear to have been an effective way of dealing with economic stress in this preindustrial rural community

Age homogamy and modernization : Evidence from turn-of-the-twentieth century Sweden

<div class="page" title="Page 2"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>Marriage is a fundamental institution with implications for economic and social development. The age difference between spouses reflects social relations across time and space. It has decreased with modernization, presumably because marriage for sentimental, rather than instrumental, reasons has become widespread. This study investigates age differences between spouses and how they changed at the time of the industrial revolution in Sweden. We analyze spatial differences in age homogamy by linking them to indicators of industrialization and modernization at the individual and community level. We use full- count census data of about 600,000 couples in 1880-1900. The results show socioeconomic and spatial differences between different measures of age homogamy, but do not support a link between cultural change and change in age homogamy. Instead they are more consistent with explanations focusing on how industrialization and urbanization relaxed the old Malthusian marriage pattern, weakening the link between property and wealth, and, by extension, that to marriage and smaller age differences between spouses.</span></p></div></div></div

The lasting impact of grandfathers : Class, occupational status, and earnings over three generations in Sweden 1815-2011

This article examines socioeconomic mobility across three generations in Sweden from 1815 and until 2011. Using longitudinal micro-level data from the Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD), we examine the transmission of socio-economic status along three different dimensions; social class (HISCLASS), occupational status (HISCAM), and earnings. We demonstrate an association between grandfathers' class or occupational status and the outcome of grandsons, when controlling for the association between fathers and sons. The associations remain stable over time and are stronger for paternal grandfathers than for maternal. For earnings, we find no grandparental association

Socioeconomic <i>status</i> and fertility before, during, and after the demographic transition: an introduction

BACKGROUND Despite a long interest in the historical fertility transition, there is still a lack of knowledge about disaggregated patterns that could help us understand the mechanisms behind the transition. In previous research the widely held view is that there was a change in the association between social status and fertility in conjunction with the fertility transition, implying that fertility went from being positively connected to social status (higher status was connected with higher fertility) to being negatively associated with fertility. OBJECTIVE The aim of this collection is to study socioeconomic patterns in the fertility transition in a variety of contexts using similar approaches and measures of socioeconomic status. METHOD All contributions use different kinds of micro-level socioeconomic and demographic data and statistical models in the analysis. Data either come from census-like records or population registers. CONCLUSIONS There is no consistent evidence for the hypothesis that socioeconomic status was positively related to fertility before the demographic transition. While such a correlation was clearly present in some contexts it was clearly not in others. There is more support for the idea that the upper and middle classes acted as forerunners in the transition, while farmers especially were late to change their fertility behavior. It is also evident that both parity-specific stopping and prolonged birth intervals (spacing) were important in the fertility transition.</br

Migration, Marriage, and Social Mobility : Women in Sweden 1880-1900

We study the social mobility of women by looking at the connection between migration and marriage outcomes using complete count census data for Sweden. The censuses 1880-1900 have been linked at the individual level, enabling us to follow 100,000 women from their parental home to their new marital household. Marriage market imbalances were not an important push factor for migration but we find a strong association between migration distance and marriage outcomes, both in terms of overall marriage probabilities and in terms of partner selection. These results highlight the importance of migration for women’s social mobility during industrialization

Famines in the Nordic countries, AD 536 - 1875

The first part of this paper aims at identifying the timing of famines in the Nordic countries since the middle ages. This is done by using qualitative famine reports from the literature since quantitative data on famines are scarce or non-existent, at least before the early modern period. We supplement the reports with climate data and price data. Our survey indicates that widespread famine was always a rare occurrence in the Nordic countries, despite frequent crop failures. The second part studies the regional famine pattern and its demographic characteristics in Sweden 1750–1910. This part is based on demographic data on parish level from the official statistics and price data. We identify two periods of excess mortality: the last major famine in Sweden in the early 1770s and the excess mortality in 1809 due to epidemic outbreaks. Examining the age-specific mortality and seasonality pattern in these two years of mortality crises in Sweden we show a highly similar pattern explained by similar causes of death being involved: dysentery and typhus. All age groups were affected during the crisis, but children over the age of one were hardest hit. Mortality was highest during the summer and early fall as epidemics spread rapidly through water and food. Thus, while Nordic people clearly were vulnerable to economic fluctuations, conditions rarely deteriorated to famine levels, which can be explained as a combination of a reasonably well-functioning market, a diversified economy, a population density in line with resource availability and the absence of serious political or war-related conditions conducive to famine

Childhood neighborhoods and health in adulthood: A life-course and nearest neighbor approach for Sweden 1939-2015

This study analyzes the association between neighborhood social class in childhood and later-life health trajectories, controlling for both class origin and class attainment in adulthood. We study the association between socio-spatial neighborhood conditions throughout childhood and a range of health outcomes in adulthood. To measure childhood conditions, we utilize unique longitudinal micro-data that contains economic and demographic information of the full population of the Swedish industrial town Landskrona, 1939-1967, which are geocoded at the address level. We measure continuous neighborhood social class using a k-nearest neighbor approach and spatial regression models. Preliminary results point to clear associations between neighborhood class and adult health, relatively independently from both class origin and adulthood class attainment. Notable gender differences are also found. The final version of the paper will include a range of other health outcomes including diagnoses, cause of death, women’s health at childbirth and birthweight of their children