Comparing U.S. GDP to the sum of measured payments to labor and imputed rental payments to capital results in a large and volatile residual or "factorless income." We analyze three common strategies of allocating and interpreting factorless income, specifically that it arises from economic...

Profitability, as measured by gross profits-to-assets, has roughly the same power as book-to-market predicting the cross-section of average returns. Profitable firms generate significantly higher average returns than unprofitable firms, despite having, on average, lower book-to-markets and...

This paper considers conceptual and practical issues that arise in measuring labor's share of national income. Most importantly: How are workers defined? How is compensation defined? The current definition of labor compensation used the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) includes the salary of...

This paper revisits capital-skill complementarity and inequality, as in Krusell, Ohanian, Rios-Rull and Violante (KORV, 2000). Using their methodology, we study how well the KORV model accounts for more recent data, including the large changes in labor's share of income that were not present in...

This paper studies the coevolution of the fall in the US corporate sector labor share and the rise of business activity in tax-preferred, pass-through form. Reallocating activity to the form it would have taken prior to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 accounts for one third of the decline in the...

A vast literature seeks to measure and explain the apparent decline in the labor share in national income that has occurred in recent times in the United States and elsewhere. The culprits include technological change, increased globalization and the rise of China, the enhanced exercise of...

This paper provides evidence from the US and Denmark that managers with a business degree ("business managers") reduce their employees' wages. Within five years of the appointment of a business manager, wages decline by 6% and the labor share by 5 percentage points in the US, and by 3% and 3...

Customs data reveal heterogeneity and granularity of relationships among buyers and sellers. A key insight is how more exports to a destination break down into more firms selling there and more buyers per exporter. We develop a quantitative general equilibrium model of firm-to-firm matching that...

We study the productivity-pay relationship in the United States and Canada along two dimensions. The first is divergence: the degree to which the levels of productivity and pay have diverged. The second is delinkage: the degree to which incremental increases in the rate of productivity growth...

We construct new technology indicators using textual analysis of patent documents and occupation task descriptions that span almost two centuries (1850-2010). At the industry level, improvements in technology are associated with higher labor productivity but a decline in the labor share....