Background

A few research still use data from the first Swedish "employer-employee" database FIEF, which was designed during the 1980's by a small group of researchers at the Trade Union Institute for Economic  Research (FIEF) led by Professor Lard Lundberg.

FIEF-database started as a longitudinal/panel register data of firms since 1986. Before 1995 the database contains information about all manufacturing firms with at least 20 employees and all nonmanufacturing firms with at least 50 employees. Since 1996, the financial statistics (FS) contain detailed information on all Swedish firms. Examples of variables included are value added, capital stock (book value), number of employees, total wages, ownership, profits, and industry sector.

Since 1990, the database was updated with information from he Regional labor market statistics (RAMS) about all establishments' composition of the labor force with respect to educational level and demographics.

Since 1996, FIEF-databas was match-merged each year with employees' variables from the individual wage statistics database (LS), which contains detailed information from official registers on a very large representative sample of employed individuals. The samples of employees contain approximately 2 million observations per year, i.e., roughly 50 percent of the Swedish labor force. Examples of variables included are full-time equivalent wages, education, labor market experience, gender and type of job.

The database was moved to Örebro University in 1999 and from 2005 is accessed via the Statistics Sweden's electronic portal (MONA) both by researchers from our group and other universities and research institutes in Sweden.