Human Capital of the Nordic Countries (HCNC) is a project to catalogue educational attainment across Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland over the long term. Our goal is to unlock access to an extensive range of detailed student-level information in order to explore the contribution of education to Scandinavia’s economic development. We use state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to transcribe historic source material, with this data in turn linked to population-wide registers (such as census records).

Among other things, our analysis considers:

• on the supply side, who received an education? How did the profile of graduates change as access to education expanded? Put another way, what was the effect of education on employment outcomes and social mobility?
• on the demand side, what motivated employers’ choice of formally trained graduates rather than ‘raw’ labour that could be trained on the job? What did the increase in skilled labour mean for productivity at the firm- or industry-level?

The HCNC project is a collaborative endeavour, drawing on researchers at universities and partner institutions in Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden.