Sven Hellroth IT Administrator/Researcher

Since 2018, I am working on IT-related issues at the Department of Economic History and International Relations. In addition, I conduct research on the emergence of early statistical attempts to monitor the Swedish economy, from the middle of the 17th century to the 1930s. Hopefully, this manuscript will be published in 2025. Furthermore, I have recently completed a small jubilee publication on the creation of the first professorship in economic history at Stockholm University in 1949. The professorship went to Ernst Söderlund. It will be published in Historisk Tidskrift, issn 0345-469x, 2024:4, under the Swedish title "

Om det administrativa arbetet bakom professuren i ekonomisk historia vid Stockholms högskola

." A longer version of the jubilee publication was also presented at the seventeenth Nordic doctrinal history meeting, NORDOM XVII in Lund, on 30 August,  with the Swedish title "

Professuren i ekonomisk historia vid Stockholms högskola 1949: ett 75 års jubileum

." 

I started my Ph.D. studies in January 2002 and received my Ph.D. in Economic History in 2011. My dissertation treats the emergence of an early public monitoring system of the business tendencies in Sweden prior to 1914, From Labour Statistics to Business Tendency Survey: Labour Question and the Emergence of a Public Monitoring System of the Swedish Economy 1893-1914. The driving force was the increasing interest in the social question towards the end of the nineteenth century. 

The thesis was followed up by a biographical article on the liberal and later on the social democrat politician Erik Palmstierna, the leading character behind the Business Tendency Survey, and an examination on the making of National Institute of Economic Research (Konjunkturinstitutet) in 1937. The results were published in Personhistorisk Tidskrift, Erik Palmstierna: föregångare till Wigforss. 108 (2012), no 2, p 133-143 (peer review), and in Historisk tidskrift, Kristallkulan och den ekonomiska politiken: Koordineringen av den ekonomiska politiken och behovet av en statlig institution för konjunkturanalyser 1893–1937 (2016), no 4, p 595-625 (peer review).

My thesis brought me into a deeper research in the Swedish labour market. My research here has mainly been focusing on the shift from a Keynesian-inspired labour market policy in 1990 toward the neo-liberal labour policy regime. In 2017, I published an article, The Activity Report as a Tool for Understanding the Job Seeking Behavior of Unemployed Persons in the Swedish journal Arbetsmarknad & Arbetsliv (2017:4), p 44-61. The research was based on a selection of two complete sample of activity reports from October and November 2014 respectively. It showed that the search intensity of the unemployed is closely related to how diversified the business community is in the country. An important result was that the foreign-born unemployed generally seem to have a higher search intensity than the domestic-born unemployed.

In December 2018, I received a scholarship from the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Research Foundation. Tore Browald's Foundation (Fh18-0028), to inventory and make available for research an individual researcher's (Ph.D. Rolf G Henriksson) extensive archive and book collection in Economic History and Economics from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The review and inventory of Henriksson's archive and book collection have been presented at the Economic Historical Meetings in Uppsala in 2019 and Gothenburg in 2021, for references see Diva

For more references on my research, see Diva.