Dairy farming and the rural exodus

Jonatan Andersson and Göran Ulväng
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Jonatan Andersson: Department of Economic History, Uppsala University
Göran Ulväng: Department of Economic History, Uppsala University

No 303, Working Papers from European Historical Economics Society (EHES)

Abstract: This article studies the role of disamenity work in the rural sector in the shift in the urban sector and growth of cities. We focus on the effects of dairy farming, a sector with famously harsh working conditions, in Sweden around the turn of the twentieth century on rural-urban migration, which was extensive at the time. We use several high-quality historical sources in our study. First, to measure dairy farming concentration in a parish, we digitize parts of the 1890 agricultural census which contains parish-level information on the number of cows per cultivation unit. Second, to identify rural-urban migrants, we link young rural individuals across the 1890 and 1910 Swedish censuses. Third, to interpret our results causally, we digitize records of historical farm property subdivisions that predict concentration in 1890. OLS, reduced form, and 2SLS estimates all point in the same direction, that high levels of dairy farming concentration in a parish pushed its residents to cities. We show that the estimates were similar for men and women, but that it was especially the lower classes and landless groups that responded to the treatment. This likely reflects that they were the most likely to perform manual labor on the large livestock farms. Ultimately, our results strongly suggest that preferences against disamenity work in the rural sector contributed to the rise in the urban sector and growth of cities.

Keywords: migration; urbanization; agriculture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N33 N53 N93 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hes:wpaper:0303

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