Lund Papers in Economic History,
Lund University, Department of Economic History

Abstract: Why do certain firms prosper and grow old while other firms fail? Established knowledge tells us that it is related to the firm’s ability to adapt to market conditions, for example through product diversification, learning-by-doing, and through the adoption of new strategies regarding technology, human resources, and management practices. This paper argues that the employment of women constituted an important competitive advantage for firms in nineteenth-century manufacturing. By using new data covering the entire Swedish tobacco industry, estimating duration models, we find that firms which employed more women were considerably less likely to fail than firms which employed men. The strategy of hiring women in order to reduce costs was a winning strategy among firms in a labor-intensive industry in competitive markets. Thus the adopters of this strategy lived on. The extended longevity of more feminized firms, in turn, reshaped the whole industry. Industry feminization may thus be seen as result of a competitive process in which more feminized firms through longevity came to dominate the industry.

Keywords: Firm survival; longevity; competing risks; competition; female employment

JEL-codes: C41; L10; L66

41 pages, November 26, 2014

Full text files

136.pdf  

Download statistics

Published as

Björn Eriksson and Maria Stanfors, (2015), 'A Winning Strategy? The employment of women and firm longevity during industrialization', Business History., pages 988-1004

• Lund University, Department of Economic History
• Home page for this series

Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Tobias Karlsson ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().

RePEc:hhs:luekhi:0136This page generated on 2024-09-13 22:16:07.