Reports

Ownershift sheds light on the current status of and structures around ownership in our society.

About the research group

Ownershift’s research group 2023/2024, consists of Emma Heikensten, Anna Nordén, Johan Karlsson and others.

Emma Heikensten has a PhD in Economics from the Stockholm School of Economics and has researched issues in behavioral economics and gender differences, including gender economics, at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. She currently works as a strategic researcher and analyst at SEB.

Anna Nordén has a PhD in Economics from Göteborgs Universitet. Her fields of specialization are environmental and behavioral economics, and sustainable development. Anna currently works as an assistant professor in economics at Jönköping International Business School.

Johan Karlsson has a PhD in economics from Örebro University, where his thesis had a heavy emphasis on the use of Swedish microdata to identify ownership structures in companies. His research focuses on business growth, family ownership and barriers to growth. Today, Johan works as a quantitative analyst with a focus on business development at Svenskt Näringsliv and is an affiliated researcher at the Center for Family Entrepreneurship and Ownership (CeFEO) at Jönköping International Business School.

In the picture to the left  Dr. Johan Karlsson, Dr. Anna Nordén  and Dr. Emma Heikensten, Ownershift research leads.

Scientific method

The report is based on extensive empirical research in the fields of economics, finance, social psychology and business administration.

Over the course of this study, however, we noted that certain aspects of ownership were understudied. For example, studies of ownership from an intersectional perspective (i.e. the interplay between gender and factors such as ethnicity, functional variations, age, sexuality, socio-economic status, and religion) were limited.

By understudied, we mean that the issues have either not been examined, that there are no studies based on large and trustworthy datasets, that hypotheses have not been tested repeatedly in different contexts, or that existing studies have not been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. This means that there is not enough evidence for us to be able to draw precise conclusions.

To wit, there is a large amount of research on topics such as the drivers of entrepreneurship, and participation in the stock market, but significantly less research on the drivers of owning forests and land. There is also a lack of studies that explore gender and ethnicity and how these work together to create different conditions for ownership. We can conclude that gender matters, and that more studies aimed at understanding the interaction between gender, ethnicity and ownership need to be implemented. Given the current state of research, it is thus difficult to draw conclusions about whether and how, for example, ethnicity reinforces the gender differences we have identified. Therefore, this report focuses only on the gender dimension.