The Stockholm School was a group of Swedish economists, active primarily in the 1930s, who developed a distinctive approach to macroeconomic analysis emphasizing expectations, disequilibrium dynamics, and the role of time in economic processes. The core figures — Erik Lindahl, Bertil Ohlin, Erik Lundberg, and Gunnar Myrdal — produced theoretical innovations that anticipated several Keynesian insights, developed independently through engagement with the earlier work of Knut Wicksell. The school's distinctive contributions included the ex ante / ex post distinction in investment analysis, sequence analysis of economic dynamics, and sustained attention to the role of uncertainty and expectation in economic decision-making.
The school's methodological signature — treating economic processes as sequences of decisions made under uncertainty with imperfect information — distinguished it from the equilibrium-centered mainstream and provided the theoretical foundation on which Myrdal would later build his cumulative causation framework. Where mainstream analysis treated markets as self-correcting through equilibrium mechanisms, the Stockholm School treated markets as dynamic processes in which