Expertise
About me
I am a Docent in Economic History, holding a Master’s and a Ph.D. from the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), with a specialization in Economic History. Since 2013, I have served as the Director of the Institute for Economic and Business History Research (EHFF) at SSE.
I am also editor-in-chief of Scandinavian Economic History Review.
Research Focus
My research explores how organizations—both public and private—have historically adapted to external changes such as technological advancements, market transformations, and regulatory shifts.
Current Research Projects
I am actively involved in several research projects that examine historical organizational responses to external changes:
Technological Change and Deregulation in Nordic Markets (1980–1995)
This project investigates the impact of technological advancements and deregulation in the Nordic telecom and stock exchange sectors from 1980 to 1995. My primary focus is on Televerket's business history, particularly during the deregulation of the Swedish telecom market. I collaborate with Christian Sandström, Robin Gustafsson, Rasmus Nykvist, Zeerim Chung, and Pasi Nevalainen on this work.
Historical Restrictions on Competition in Retail and Advertising
This project examines how actors in Sweden’s retail trade and advertising industries have historically sought to restrict competition. My specific focus is 1) on how dominant full-service advertising firms attempted to create barriers to entry and other competitive restrictions through measures such as occupational licensing and special arrangements for public advertising production, particularly before the advertising agency cartel was declared illegal in 1965. 2) how Swedish retailers have restricted entry through corporate political activity or by collusion.
AI, Databases, and Qualitative Big Data in Economic Research
A central part of my research focuses on developing methods for analyzing large-scale qualitative data in economic and social science research. Many economically relevant phenomena—such as regulatory change, corporate political activity, and institutional coordination—are primarily documented in textual sources, including archival records, policy documents, and corporate correspondence. Traditionally, these materials have been difficult to analyze systematically or at scale.
To address this challenge, I co-founded and chair the Digital History Consortium (Digihist), www.digihist.org, an international research collaboration dedicated to building large-scale relational databases for institutional research. Through Digihist, tens of thousands of archival documents have been digitized, structured, and linked in relational data architectures that connect actors, organizations, events, and decisions over time.
These databases allow researchers to transform unstructured documentary material into structured datasets suitable for systematic analysis. Using relational database design, structured coding frameworks, and AI-assisted tools such as machine-learning classification and similarity search, qualitative materials can be organized to support reproducibility while preserving full document-level provenance.
The broader goal of this work is to integrate qualitative big data into empirical research in economics and the social sciences. By combining database architecture, machine learning techniques, and transparent coding procedures, this approach enables the systematic measurement of institutional variables that are often difficult to capture using traditional datasets.
Teaching
(756) Comparative Economic History – Theory and Evidence (Course director)
(7311) Financial and Business History (Course director)
(PhD761) Contemporary Methods for Historical Research (Course director)