I received my doctoral degree from Lund University in 1980. My doctoral dissertation was concerned with the development of the textile industry during the Second World War with special emphasis on technological change and labour market issues. I then started to work on the area of population economics - more specifically on the short-term demographic response to changes in real wages using historical records at macro level for Sweden.

Later in the 80s I combined a life event history approach with a time-series approach analysing effects of community wide real wages on individuals using family reconstitution and register data for Sweden back to 1650. In order to digitize the data, I started a project called Scanian Economic Demographic Database (SEDD) together with the Provincial Archives in Lund in 1983. The database in now administrated by the Centre for Economic Demography (CED). The same approach is also used in the EurAsia Project on Population and Family History, which started in 1994 and which includes China, Japan, Italy, Belgium, and Sweden. The main focus of the project is to analyse differences in living standards measured as the demographic response to short-term economic stress.

In the beginning of the 2000s, I started a project on effects of conditions in early life hood on health and socioeconomic performance in later life using a similar approach and similar data.

In addition to the analysis of historical Sweden I have been involved in studies of immigration to Sweden during the last 30 years. A large scale database with longitudinal information on individuals has been created at CED using various types of register data including information home land data like education and work experience. The analyses include all stages of the life cycle with main focus on income assimilation, job mobility, health, and early retirement.