Cities and the Rise of Working Women

Thor Berger (), Mounir Karadja () and Erik Prawitz
Additional contact information
Thor Berger: Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS),, Postal: Uppsala University; Department of Economic History, School of Economics and Management, Lund University; CEPR; and Research Institute of Industrial Economics
Mounir Karadja: Department of Economics, Uppsala University

No 1516, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: We document that large cities were instrumental in shaping women’s work and family outcomes in the early 20th century. We focus on migrants to Stockholm, Sweden’s largest city, using representative, linked census data. Female migrants to Stockholm saw persistent changes in work and family outcomes over the life-cycle. Migrants were approximately 50 percentage points more likely to enter the labor force and less likely to marry or have children than their sisters migrating to rural areas. They experienced skill-upgrading and higher real incomes, without adverse mortality effects. Early structural shifts towards services partly explain these patterns.

Keywords: Female labor force participation; Migration; Urbanization; Economic history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I15 N93 Q25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 80 pages
Date: 2025-01-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-his, nep-lab, nep-mig and nep-ure
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Related works:
Working Paper: Cities and the Rise of Working Women (2024)
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