This paper provides novel insights on the changing functional distribution of income in the post-war US economy. We present a Divisia index decomposition of the US labor share (1948–2017) by fourteen sectors. The decomposition method furnishes exact contributions from four components towards...

This paper surveys current debates on the distributive cycle. The literature builds on R.M. Goodwin's seminal 1967 chapter titled "A growth cycle." We review theoretical motivations for the distributive cycle, which, despite significant differences, all imply that macroeconomic activity leads...

This paper investigates the interaction of structural change and the labor share. We use a series of thought experiments that combine theoretical assumptions underlying labor markets in Baumol and Lewis with the accounting of a sectoral decomposition of the labor share. The focus lies on a shift...

We explore four decades of cyclical and long-run dynamics in income distribution and economic activity for a panel of thirteen OECD countries. Based on predator-prey dynamics, we find that the business cycle is weakly profit-led , and that the long-run equilibrium has been shifting towards a...

This paper surveys current debates on the distributive cycle. The literature builds on R.M. Goodwin's seminal 1967 chapter titled "A growth cycle." We review theoretical motivations for the distributive cycle, which, despite significant differences, all imply that macroeconomic activity leads...

This paper contributes to the literature on secular stagnation by estimating a measure of potential output growth for the post-war US economy derived from a novel model specification that allows for the cyclical interactions between income distribution, represented by the trajectory of the labor...

We propose a novel methodological approach to disentangle the main structural shocks affecting the US labour share of income during the immediate post-war era (1948Q1- 1984Q4) and the Great Moderation (1985Q1-2018Q3). We motivate a SVAR model in aggregate demand, unemployment rate, real wage and...