Labor Shares in Some Advanced Economies

We study the joint impact of three measurement issues in the empirical literature on the labor share: (i) start and end periods for the empirical analysis; (ii) accounting for self-employment; and (iii) accounting for residential real estate income. When we correct for these three potential biases, we do not find a general decline in the labor share in our sample of advanced economies. In that respect the behavior of the US labor share after 2000 presents a puzzle.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at "http://www.nber.org/papers/w26136"