About the Foundations

That year, Handelsbanken’s board decided to establish a foundation for social science research, contributing five million SEK. The initiative came from Tore Browaldh, then the bank’s CEO.

More than 60 years later, the foundations’ assets have grown to SEK 13 billion (as of the end of 2024/25), and the total amount disbursed to research now exceeds SEK 3.9 billion.

Handelsbanken’s research foundations comprise the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation and the Tore Browaldh Foundation.

The foundations are overseen by a board currently consisting of three members.

Applications are processed, and decisions on grants are made by a research committee composed of ten academic members and the board. The researchers on the committee are professors of economics, business administration, and economic history at various Swedish universities.

It is therefore the committee – not the foundations’ common board – that decides which researchers and institutions will receive funding.

The board’s responsibility is to manage the foundations’ assets on the Swedish stock market and to determine how much of the annual return – at least 80 percent – should be made available to the research committee. The board also appoints new committee members when appropriate.

It is difficult to quantify the full impact these foundations have had on economic research in Sweden. One indication is their share of total research funding at individual universities. For those that report such data – including the Stockholm School of Economics and the School of Economics at Lund University – Handelsbanken’s support corresponds to roughly 25–35 percent of all funding for economic research. Another indication is the number of researchers simultaneously receiving some form of support from the foundations, estimated at around 1,200 individuals.