This paper analyzes the sources of labor share variations and its general downward trend, observed recently in most European economies. Using a unique quarterly firmlevel panel dataset from the Polish enterprise sector in the period 1995–2008, we quantify the impacts on the observed variation...

The non-constancy of factor shares is drawing the attention of many researchers. We document an average drop of the labour share of 8 percentage points for eight European countries and the US between 1980 and 2007. We investigate theoretically and empirically two mechanisms: the substitution...

This article investigates how changing production processes and increasing market power at the firm level relate to a fall in Germany’s manufacturing sector labour share. Coinciding with the fall of the labour share, I document a rise in firms’ product and labour market power. Notably,...

I study the effect of increasing competition on financial performance through labour leverage. To capture competition, I exploit variation in product market contestability in the U.S. airline industry. First, I find that increasing competitive pressure leads to increasing labour leverage,...

This paper assesses empirically the hypotheses by Bental and Demougin (2010) that innovations in ICT (Information and Communication Technology) reduce the labor share in OECD countries by improving the monitoring technology. In a first step, I show that data trends for the labor share, wages in...

We investigate the long-term drivers of the labor share in Japan using data from the Japanese Industrial Productivity database from 1970 to 2012. The descriptive and econometric results indicate that the decline in the labor share observed in Japan during the period of analysis was highly...

This paper examines labor's share of income in Hungary. We find that the trend in labor's share is substantially influenced by the treatment of self-employment; self-employment has declined significantly because of both shifts across sectors and reductions within sectors. Hungary's labor share...

This paper revisits the discussion of the determinants of the declining labour share in industrialised countries. We select a panel of 20 OECD countries with the most advanced industrial capabilities and explore the effects of technological progress on the labour income share. We incorporate a...

The literature on unemployment has mostly focused on labor market issues while the impact of capital formation is largely neglected. Job-creation is often thought to be a matter of encouraging more employment on a given capital stock. In contrast, this paper explicitly deals with the long-run...