This chapter presents new, nominal and real price indices for real estate in Stockholm from 1726 up to 1875. The new series presented here can be linked to already existing price indices for real estate in Stockholm: from 1875 up to 1957; from 1957 to1975 3 and; from 1975 up to 2020.

For this, a new database is used that covers registered real estate transactions in the present inner city of Stockholm for the period and the method of repeated sales is applied. The indices are based on information from 22,169 unique transactions. To control for qualitative changes inthe housing stock, a database of 7,915 issued building permits has been used.

In this dissertation three central themes concerning the ownership and allocation in the city of Stockholm over long periods are examined.

The first theme property markets involves constructions of real estate price indexes spanning from 1726 to 2018. The second theme property rights concerns the regulation of private and public ownership of real estate from 1874 to 2010. The third theme entrepreneurship in urban environments is an examination of the efforts to influence property markets and property rights through entrepreneurship in difference sectors from the 1920s to the 2010s.

With an extensive amount of empirical material, this dissertation examines and relates the three themes to each other and shed new light on urban dynamics from an historical perspective. This dissertation is particularly important today when ownership and prices of real estate in cities are burning issues, and entrepreneurship is of central importance for development. The dissertation is a compilation thesis consisting of six articles.

In this chapter, we analyse the historical role of community norms and sharing ideas in the Swedish housing market as part of industrial transformation processes. We compare the emergence of a new organizational form, the housing cooperative, from the 1930s and onwards with the rise of the contemporary digital platform-based sharing economy. In the past, housing cooperatives were used to share the burden of risk between individual citizens, whereas contemporary sharing platforms allow for sharing the burden of ownership in cities with soaring housing prices. We ask if and how the role of community norms and sharing practices have changed over the last century and who was involved in transforming the housing market. We draw on rich historical secondary sources on the development of housing cooperatives as part of the Swedish model as well as on contemporary debate about the impact of sharing economy actors, such as Airbnb, on the Swedish housing market. In drawing on a semantic analysis of official government investigations on the housing cooperatives, we show that community norms have played a vital part in the industrial transformation of the Swedish housing market, indicating that informal institutions endured while formal institutions have gone through major transformations.

Earlier research describes the development of real housing prices as a ‘hockey stick’, i.e. of long stagnation followed by a sharp upturn in recent decades. A problem is that there are very few indices of residential property covering longer periods. Using a database of around 10,900 sales, this study presents a historical housing price index for Stockholm 1818–1875, which extend a previous index by 57 years, one of the longest for any city. A so-called repeated sales index is compared to a sales price appraisals ratio index. We show that in real terms there have been two long upswings, in 1855–1887 and 1993–2018. In other periods, real prices were stagnant or even slightly declining. The nineteenth century upturn did not end in a crash, but was followed by stagnation for a century. There are many similarities between the two upturns. For example, both coincided with the demographic expansion and were preceded by deregulations. During both periods, properties became more expensive relative income levels. 

I kriser testas våra samhällen på ett unikt sätt, men kriser kan också föra mänskligheten framåt. Digitaliseringen av samhället är en av de faktorer som kan få en positiv skjuts tack vare det globala ekonomiska experiment som just nu pågår. Precis som första världskriget gav den andra industriella revolutionen en rejäl skjuts, kan krisen till följd av covid-19 vara det som gör att den digitala revolutionen slår igenom på radikalt bredare front.

How are historical, practice-oriented, and critical research perspectives in management affected by digitalization? In this article, we describe and discuss how two digital research approaches can be applied and how they may influence the future directions of management scholarship and education: Social Media Analytics and digital archives. Our empirical illustrations suggest that digitalization generates productivity improvements for scholars, making it possible to undertake research that was previously too laborious. It also enables researchers to pay closer attention to detail while still being able to abstract and generalize. We therefore argue that digitalization contributes to a historical turn in management, that practice-oriented research can be conducted with less effort and improved quality and that micro-level data in the form of digital archives and online contents make it easier to adopt critical perspectives.