In continental Europe, labour shares in national income have exhibited considerable variation since 1970. Empirical and theoretical research suggests that the evolution of labour markets and labour market imperfections can, in part, explain this phenomenon. The author analyzes the role of...

The past two decades have seen a decline in labor's share of national income in several industrial countries. This paper analyzes the role of three factors in explaining movements in labor's share - factor-biased technological progress, openness to trade, and changes in employment protection -...

Contradicting the conventional wisdom of constant factor shares, the portion of national income accruing to labor has been trending downward in the last three decades. This decline must have contributed to rising inequality as labor income is more evenly distributed than capital income. This...

Complementing the existing literature that focuses mostly on the personal distribution of income, this paper studies how social democratic governments affect the factor distribution of national income between capital and labor, in the corporate sector. Drawing from the literature on partisanship...

This paper evaluates the effects of optimal Ramsey rules for government expenditure (investment in physical and human capital) and revenue (taxes on labor and capital income) on welfare, debt stabilization, output and factor shares. The real macroeconomic model is calibrated and estimated to...

The past two decades have seen a decline in labor''s share of national income in several industrial countries. This paper analyzes the role of three factors in explaining movements in labor''s share--factor-biased technological progress, openness to trade, and changes in employment...

We propose a theory-based adjustment to the labor income share to correct for the self-employment bias. Through a two-sector neoclassical framework with agriculture and non-agriculture, we derive the productivity-adjusted aggregate labor income share in terms of the agricultural productivity...