Olof Ejermo, Kerstin Enflo, Björn Eriksson, Jing Xiao

The mass emigration to America saw 1.4 million Swedes leave their homeland, while 200,000 eventually returned. This project asks: How did these return migrants affect Swedish entrepreneurship, and where was their impact felt?

Case studies suggest that returning inventors and entrepreneurs had a significant influence on Swedish society, but systematic information is lacking on (a) where return migrants settled, (b) the entrepreneurial activities they pursued, and (c) how they affected entrepreneurship in the places to which they returned. To investigate these questions, we are creating a new dataset that links emigration and immigration data with population registers, occupational data, records of inventors, and information on entrepreneurs at both individual and parish level. This will allow us to assess how return migrants transformed local business structures by combining statistical analyses of the regional distribution of entrepreneurship with analyses of the intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurial behaviour using genealogical data.

Our research will contribute to theories seeking to explain why entrepreneurship tends to persist within regions and whether such path dependence can be altered by shocks that trigger population movements. The project will therefore advance our understanding of how poor agrarian societies can undergo a transformation towards industrialisation and modern economic growth. This is also relevant to our understanding of international migration flows as a potential channel for shaping entrepreneurship over the long term.