Score contribution per author:
α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count
The article tests a variant of Lars G. Sandberg's “financial sophistication hypothesis.” Sandberg argues that Sweden had an unusually large stock of financial capital in 1850 which, along with a highly literate populace, was paramount in the subsequent economic explosion. Unable to test the hypothesis directly, we use a variant—that the financial sector was a leading sector in Swedish development—amenable to time-series tests of the Granger-causality form. These tests on data from 1861 to 1910 do not show causality from financial variables to real; indeed, the converse holds.