Wages, Profits, and Rent-Sharing.

This paper suggests a new test for rent-sharing in the U.S. labor market. Using an unbalanced panel from the manufacturing sector, it shows that a rise in a sector's profitability leads after some years to an increase in the long-run level of wages in that sector. The paper controls for workers' characteristics, for industry fixed effects, and for unionism. Richard A. Lester's (1952) range of wages is estimated, for rent-sharing reasons alone, at approximately 24 percent of the mean wage. Copyright 1996, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.